Connection is everything
19th SEPTEMBER 2025
A Business Playbook Inspired by Taylor Swift’s Tribal Fandom
Launched globally on
september 13
Speech Summary
With the birth of the Beta generation, we now have seven different consumer demographics to serve, five of them as patients. From Traditionalists (born after WWII) and Baby Boomers, all the way through to Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha and on to the Beta babies of today, meeting consumer needs as a brand has become a more complex task.
Change in all forms presses down on every industry and the demands placed on our industry are no exception. Change comes at us as Technological, Economic, Social, Regulatory and most critically from our customers’ expectations themselves. As faculty, we also need to acknowledge that we need to change how we educate and inspire.
To survive (and thrive) every brand needs to exert a greater force against these changes, otherwise we will be crushed by them. To survive and ensure our businesses are future focused, we need to have the courage to embrace new directions. We need to collaborate and have an excellence in execution to have better connections with those we seek to educate and motivate.
It would be arrogant of us to assume that we can continue to run our business or courses the same way over the next 10 years as we have over the past 10, as arrogant as Kodak thinking digital photography would be a fad, or Nokia feeling their scale would protect them against the iPhone. Arrogance kills entire brands and industries, and it could kill your business and connection with an audience faster than you think. As customer expectations change, alongside our business and service landscape, so must we.
Staying relevant is key to survival and so we aim to focus on what our audiences value – true of both our patients in our clinical practice and our peers as faculty. It is in exploring and understanding the values of the modern connection, we can build a business for future success.
Take your eye off what your audience value and you run the risk of becoming irrelevant. We discussed three key values in the first half of the keynote.
Blue Dot Centricity
We need to place our audience at the centre, not the product, clinical processes, or our own ways of teaching. They are not some inconvenient truth at the end of a customer journey. They are the BLUE DOT – the pulsing centre point around which everything must revolve.
Everything comes to the customer today. Why go to a restaurant when Grub Hub will deliver to your home? Why go out on the streets to flag a cab when Uber will deliver on to your door? Why use an expensive orthodontist when you can straighten your teeth with mail-order clear braces? Customer expectations have changed. As an industry, healthcare has been operational and clinically centric for too long. We need to shift from a process to a customer experience focus. Our audiences also expect more personalised and focused teaching and inspiration.
Carrying the Blue Dot metaphor farther, no one would open Google maps and follow someone else’s blue dot on the map – you are only shown your own. The modern audience expects to be treated personally; made feel special, have heavily customised interaction at every touch point.
Sometimes we utilise technology to do this at scale. Every time I arrive at the airport car park, the barrier reads my vehicle registration, the barrier automatically lifts, and my visit is auto-charged to my credit card as the WELCOME KEN message appears on the ticket terminal. No matter how many times I do this, I feel like James Bond. I feel recognised.
Make them feel special by connecting personally with them. Move away from a commodity experience as an educator. Use data to better leverage that connection. Dentistry is notoriously commodity focused. Brand is everything when it comes to differentiation.
Think about how you can better connect with your audience in a way that makes them feel like they are at the centre.
Phygital
We now live in a ‘Digital First World’ – a world where we all reach for our digital devices first to answer any question or solve any problem. The digital Immersion is only going to increase with the coming Quantum Computing reality and as AI and Robotics converge alongside customer expectations. The healthcare experience, and indeed society as a whole, will never be the same again.
Every brand proposition has to be part Physical, part Digital. Customers now expect digital to drive their experiences. If you are not leveraging your assets on digital, you are 50% invisible as a business today.
AI is set to change every industry. Most importantly, it will unleash a new set of customer and audience expectations around hyper personalisation and relevance for customers in every brand and service interaction, including education. Avatars, video, and AI tools all need to be embedded in our everyday approach to inspiration.
Ask yourself how you can better engage across the digital reality. How can you build and leverage digital and AI assets in how you educate and inspire?
Digital is not about new channels, AI and contact points (although it is those things too). Digital is simply our societal reality today, but more importantly it is about how we make a customer ‘feel’.
AI is only useful to us if a customer feels something positive, feels more connected to the content.
Relational
Ultimately, building Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Intimacy is about building Relationships. It is about moving away from the old ‘transaction model’ and moving towards a model that is based around putting the Relationship at the centre. This is why CX has become such an inherent part of most companies’ strategy.
It is no different in education. Your relationship with your audience is everything, and too many faculty members simply treat their sessions as a transaction.
It is only when emotions are engaged do we build relationship, when an audience ‘feels’ something. We need to become a trusted partner in life for our patients as well as peers. This is a new space for many healthcare brands, traditionally process on clinician centred. Similarly it is a new space for us in education.
The more we embed emotional response and authentic, compassionate customer interactions in the customer experience, the more we build that bond with a customer. We achieve both scale and depth of connection. Your audience is your customer – never forget that.
Look for ways to build significant relationships, with depth, authenticity and purpose. Recall the Taylor Swift fan enraptured with experiencing the product. This type of engagement only comes when there is a significant relationship related to the brand experience.
In our future deep-fake, AI-fuelled world, authentic relationship will be everything.
In the second segment of the keynote, we explored what makes a good performance and gave some tips relating to how to improve engagement.
Authenticity
This is a key value in every brand interaction today and it is imperative that an audience feels authentically connected to you. How authenticity manifests for each individual is different – that is the point. For some it will be through humour, for others through emotive engagement and storytelling.
Seek to make your audience interactions uniquely yours. Think about how you can build authenticity into how you present, the information you share, who you are as a faculty member.
Storyteling
We discussed the importance and power of ‘the story’ in teaching and sharing key messages. Be they playful stories (The Virgin Goldfish) or emotive and powerful stories (The United Airlines Delay), stories stay with an audience long after facts, data and software demos have faded.
Look to create story moments through your sessions so that your key messaging will be delivered. Stories are shared and they bring our content to life.
Video, Visuals and Props
We live in an audio-visual world, one that is heavily visual, and video led.
Our attention spans for taking in complex information is lower than before and so we need to adjust how we impart information on screen.
Ensure that all your on-screen visuals are clean, impactful, and clever. The days of putting text-heavy PowerPoint on a screen and expecting people to stay attentive are over. It is not the 1990s.
Utilise video wherever possible. Seek to embed short (<45 seconds) video into your presentation decks to illustrate a point, to entertain, to break up visual monotony and to inspire.
Think about incorporating a physical prop at the right time to create a strong visual memory – perhaps to reinforce a metaphor or a particular aspect of treatment. Make them impactful.
Utilise AI
There is a huge amount of information to be edited down into knowledge sessions.
Utilise AI tools to do all the heavy lifting. Use Chat GPT and Gemini to summarise, to design effective lesson plans, flow and then populate these in PowerPoint and Keynote.
Get familiar with all the (everchanging) AI tools available for education and presentation – from Plus AI to Hey Gen and VEO3, your visuals and presentation structures are only limited by your creativity and imagination.
Write with rhythm
When you are designing a session, remember that all 3 or 5 act plays, movies and stories have changes in rhythm, pace, and emotion. Do not design a session where you expect your audience to sit through content delivered in the same way, in the same tone, with similar visuals. You will lose them within 15 minutes.
Take what you have written and analyse it through the 3/5 Act model – where are the highs, the pauses, the impact moments, the emotion, the engagement, the rhetorical questions?
Perform
Lastly – you are not a faculty member, teacher or speaker. Like it or not, when you stand up in front of an audience and take the mic/clicker, you are a performer. Your audience expects a performance and expect to be inspired, educated and entertained.
Bring a performance energy to how you teach. Find your unique performance style and lean into it. The moment you acknowledge the performance element of teaching, everything changes.
Your CX Strategy Audit
8 Questions to Answer
- If you were to make your presentations more BLUE DOT tomorrow, what would that look like? Where in the session could you do a better job at making it about THE AUDIENCE and not about the content or yourself?
- Where could you go beyond audience expectations into the delight space? What 5 ideas could we bring to life in the sessions that would make a delegate smile in delight?
- What AI elements add value to the emotive audience experience? Where can you include AI to streamline your approach?
- What moments have you created in the last session you delivered that would be your Goldfish Story? Who is telling your Brand Story today?
- Who is your Excite & Delight Director within your team, responsible for delivering moments that go beyond customer expectation. How would that work in your practice but also in your faculty sessions?
- In your practice, what are you doing in the Employee Experience space that motivates your employees to want to deliver 5-star CX service? All of the values discussed apply to employees also.
- If a delegate felt your sessions were not worth attending, where is that failure most likely to have come from? Your delivery? Your visuals? Your relationship with the audience? Your performance? Audit your teaching and identify pain points and look to dissolve them.
- Where is the evidence you are building relationships in your knowledge provision? Where are you authentic and pushing past transactional teaching into relationship?
More content from Ken
To get a more detailed feel for Ken Hughes content, check out his Blog – The Blue Dot Consumer. Widely read by those in the marketing, customer experience and retail worlds, it is full of in-depth discussion and content relating to all things consumer.
GAME, SET, AND MATCH: WHAT WIMBLEDON TAUGHT US ABOUT EXCEPTIONAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
THE HIDDEN LANGUAGE OF LOYALTY: CX CONNECTION IS EVERYTHING
COURAGE, TRUST & BELIEF IN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
For those too lazy to read blogs, and to view further visual content and past performances from Ken Hughes, check out the YouTube channel where he discusses all things consumer and customer experience related.
A Business Playbook Inspired by Taylor Swift’s Tribal Fandom
If you were inspired by today’s keynote and would like a deeper dive into Customer Intimacy, Customer Connection and building Tribal Belonging, get yourself a copy of Taylormaking: A New Era of Modern Branding and Customer Connection.
