Gordon Euchler & Maik Hoffman · Co-founders · The Spikes
Gordon Euchler has a PhD from Cambridge, a decade in advertising, and years at Deloitte. Maik Hoffman has run creative strategy for brands across Europe and spent time on both the client and agency side. They founded The Spikes after a shared frustration: too many meetings with more opinions than people, and not enough substance. Their company collects, analyses, and disseminates what actually excites people — a question they have asked 156,000 people across the Western world. This playbook captures their framework for turning customer centricity from a corporate value into an operational discipline.
80% of companies claim to be customer-centric. 80% of customers disagree. The gap is your opportunity.
The headline principles from the episode. The full step-by-step framework follows below.
The Playbook
The Spikes have asked 156,000 people one question: did a company recently do something that you truly enjoyed? Out of the thousands of companies trying to reach each person, they can name only one. Excitement is not an absolute. It is relative to everything else happening in the category. A competitor who significantly raises their excitement score creates a new baseline — for everyone.
Why it's overlooked: Companies monitor competitor features and pricing. Almost none monitor competitor excitement scores. The gap you cannot see is the one that surprises you.
The Playbook
A bank sends a bot to handle customers who have missed loan payments. Standard logic says use your most empathetic human for that call. The data says the bot performs better — because the customer is ashamed and would rather admit it to a machine. A post-purchase discount arrives after the transaction is complete. To the customer, it feels like a gift, not a promotion. These ideas only emerge when you switch from what you are sending to what they are receiving.
Why it's overlooked: Counterintuitive ideas are hard to defend before testing. They sound wrong. The data consistently shows they work. Most companies never test them because the proposal does not survive the internal review.
The Playbook
80% of companies claim to be customer-centric. 80% of people do not experience companies that way. Preference surveys and satisfaction scores show what people want to be seen as preferring. Excitement research — asking what actually surprised and delighted them recently — shows what actually happened. The gap between those two is where the opportunity lives.
Why it's overlooked: NPS and CSAT scores are in every dashboard. They are easy to benchmark and easy to report to leadership. Excitement research is messier, harder to operationalise, and harder to compare quarter-over-quarter.
The Playbook
A chatbot that evokes friendship works in telecoms. That same mechanism — using technology to remove emotional friction rather than add efficiency — can work in banking, healthcare, or retail. The mechanism transfers. The specific tactic does not. The companies that find the next big customer experience idea in their category usually borrowed it from somewhere else.
Why it's overlooked: Industry benchmarking feels rigorous and responsible. It is also the fastest way to converge on the same set of ideas as every competitor and call it innovation.
Research cited by Gordon shows that 80% of companies claim to be customer-centric and are actively investing in it. The same research shows that 80% of people do not experience companies as customer-centric.
This is not a cynical observation. It is a structural one. Customer centricity declared in a values document is not customer centricity experienced in a service interaction or a product decision.
The gap between what companies send and what customers receive is the space where excitement either lives or dies. Acknowledging the gap honestly is the starting point for closing it.
"You don't have to look up that study, because you can feel it every day. Especially if you work in marketing, you know that there is so much activity. But you also know from your personal life — not everything companies do is truly reaching out to the people." — Gordon Euchler
Ask five of your actual customers — without leading them — to describe the last time your company surprised them positively. If fewer than three can name a specific moment, your customer centricity is declared, not experienced.
Traditional market research asks what people prefer or how satisfied they are. These questions produce answers filtered through social desirability. People answer as who they want to be seen as, not as who they actually are.
The Spikes research methodology asks a different question: "Have you recently had contact with a company that you truly enjoyed?" Respondents can name only one company. This constraint forces authenticity. The responses reveal patterns that preference surveys never surface — the specific touchpoints, emotions, and mechanisms that create genuine excitement.
Two findings from The Spikes data that standard surveys would never produce. First: a chatbot for handling missed loan payments became the most exciting brand touchpoint for a bank — because it removed the shame of admitting you did not pay, better than a human call could. Second: a post-purchase discount received after the transaction is perceived as a gift, not a promotion.
In your next customer research initiative, replace satisfaction scores with one open question: "When is the last time we surprised or genuinely delighted you in a way you did not expect?" Analyse the patterns. The touchpoints that appear most frequently are your excitement assets.
The most important perspective shift in customer experience: move from the company's view to the customer's view. Not what are we doing, what are we sending, what are our initiatives — but what are they receiving, what do they experience, what does it feel like to be on the other side of this touchpoint.
These perspectives are often radically different. A company's most resource-intensive initiative may be invisible to customers. A small operational decision — the wording of an error message, the response time to a complaint — may be disproportionately memorable.
"Most of the ads being made today are directed not to the people, but to the company — to the people within the company. That clearly shows." — Paul Smith, quoted by Gordon Euchler. Internal approval processes and internal politics distort the message before it reaches the customer. The antidote is to design from the outside in.
Identify your most recent significant marketing or product decision. Write down how it looked from the internal team's perspective and how it was likely experienced by the customer. If you cannot describe the customer's experience specifically, you do not have enough information to evaluate the decision.
Some of the highest-impact customer experience innovations violate conventional marketing logic.
The post-purchase discount reverses the intuitive order of incentive. The bot for debt collection removes expected human empathy and performs better. The chatbot that evokes friendship outperforms the human team in NPS data.
These counterintuitive solutions share a common structure. They take something the company expects to cause friction and redesign it to create delight. They are only possible by looking at the situation from the customer's actual emotional state, not from the company's operational assumptions.
The telco friendship example: one telecom brand consistently evoked the feeling of friendship in customer surveys. The mechanism was not just human employees. It was also their chatbot — designed to feel warm and genuinely helpful rather than transactional. "Technology can be used to become more emotional, more engaging. Rather than digital technology, do human technology." — Gordon Euchler
Identify three touchpoints in your customer journey that currently create friction. For each, ask: what is the customer's actual emotional state at this moment? What would genuinely surprise them positively? Design one counterintuitive solution and test it.
Traditional competitive analysis tracks what competitors are doing — features, pricing, marketing spend, positioning. What it misses: how excited customers are about those competitors relative to you.
Excitement is comparative. What was thrilling yesterday becomes standard tomorrow. A competitor who significantly increases customer excitement scores creates a new baseline in the category. If you are not tracking excitement — not just satisfaction or NPS — you may be delivering perfectly adequate experiences while a competitor has quietly raised the bar.
"It doesn't help if I become twice as exciting as I was a year ago when my competitors managed to become three times as exciting. So you need to stay on your toes and understand what's happening around you." — Maik Hoffman
Add a cross-industry excitement benchmark to your competitive monitoring. Do not just track what direct competitors do. Track which companies in adjacent categories are generating high excitement and study what they are doing. The next exciting innovation in your industry may come from a completely different sector.
Cross-industry inspiration outperforms within-category benchmarking for generating genuinely novel customer experience ideas.
If you study only what your direct competitors are doing, you will at best converge on the category standard. If you study what the most exciting companies across all industries are doing — and ask whether that mechanism could apply in your context — you create the conditions for genuine innovation.
A bank that creates excitement through chatbot design may be the inspiration for a healthcare company's patient experience. The mechanism transfers. The tactic does not.
"The touch point at which your competitor managed to excite people in their industry may directly inspire a touch point innovation for your industry that has not reached you yet. You're not benchmarking with what your industry does best — you're benchmarking with what the best companies across all industries do best." — Maik Hoffman
Identify three companies outside your industry with high customer excitement scores. Study what specifically creates their excitement: the touchpoint, the emotional mechanism, the unexpected design choice. Then ask: what is the version of that mechanism that would work in your category?
The playbook is derived from the conversation. The nuance and the reasoning behind every principle are in the episode itself.
"It is possible to not just play a little role in people's lives, but to make a difference — and it is worth pursuing that."
Episode 002 · Mar 2024