Welcome to the Golden Rule, an occasional series of blogs, vlogs, and articles by Tim Mason and Sarah Jarvis on the subject of "The Golden Rule."
We mentioned the Golden Rule four times in our recently published book, Omnichannel Retail, but felt there was so much more to say. So here we go…
I first came across the Golden Rule in a business context when reading Fred Reichheld’s book, "The Loyalty Effect," in 1997. At the time, I was the CMO at Tesco, working under Sir Terry Leahy. It had been almost two years since we had launched Tesco Clubcard, which was performing remarkably well. However, inspired by Reichheld, we were able to crystalize our purpose further and sharpen our strategy.
We already had a clearly stated guiding principle for the organization in our "Every Little Helps" slogan but developed our overarching mission to "create value for customers to earn their lifetime loyalty", mainly because Reichheld had so clearly demonstrated that loyalty should be our ultimate quest.
To achieve this, we said that "no one would try harder for customers than Tesco" and that we would 'treat people the way they would like to be treated' – following the Golden Rule that Reichheld references on four occasions in his first book.
And it worked.
During the ensuing 15 or so years, I had the privilege of witnessing firsthand Tesco’s remarkable growth, which was achieved because of following these guidelines.