If you think back to business 101s, expansion usually meant investing more money in factories and capital machinery. But service companies have, happily, never had that option. They could invest more in marketing or in customer relations or in the quality of their offices (which is exactly what banks and consultancies do) or latterly in information systems but the reality of a service business is that the attention economy arrived early. How to deal with it?
These thoughts came to my mind recently when I was talking to John Hayes, CMO at American Express, just prior to the launch of the new “Membership Effect” marketing campaign.