Cheap shopping online and overseas eat into department store sales. But stores also need to make shopping enjoyable.

Experience matters. We live in an experience age and brands can no longer build strong positions by providing clear functional benefits. In research I undertook  with a former colleague, Professor Peter Darke at York University, and then student and now professor at Queens University, Laurence Ashworth, we showed that exposing consumers to irrelevant experiential cues, e.g., asking consumers to listen to music genres they liked versus disliked on a given portable CD player influenced their choice of portable CD players. Consumers chose CD players that were objectively inferior on functional benefits like battery life and weight, two important characteristics of portable CD players, when they listened to disliked music genres on them, even though the music experience was irrelevant to choice. Consumers would, after all, never listen to a disliked genre of music on the CD player once they took it home!

The refrain I often here among practitioners is that they are facing declining growth, ever increasing competition, and loss of pricing power and thus margin. Is this inevitable in the world of business today, or is there a way that businesses can recharge growth and regain margins? Below are three case studies of companies that have successfully recharged profitable growth and there is a remarkable commonality in their paths to success. We first report the case studies and then draw out the lessons for recharging profitable growth in your business.