Jean-Pierre LaCroix is the President and Chief Strategy Officer of SLD. He is a seasoned strategic thinker who has held numerous strategies on personifying brands through immersive design. With more than 35 years of experience in the development and implementation of retail transformation programs, including ground-breaking transformation tools he has developed such as the “Trust Ladder” and “Ideal Omni Experience Model,” he will provide an in-depth knowledge to the project.
Jean Pierre has over 46 years of experience. SLD was founded in 1990. He has worked with organizations such as Nu Skin, Tip Top, RBC Bank, TD Canada Trust, Jackson Hewitt, Regions Bank, M&M Food Market, Toronto Blue Jays, just to name a few.
When he’s not at work, he’s an avid reader of non-fiction and has also published several books of his own, one of which we will be discussing today.
Questions
- Can you share a bit about your personal journey and how you progressed from where you started to where you are today?
- As an author, can you share what your book ThinkBlink Manifesto is about, what inspired you to write it, who it’s geared toward, and how it can help the people you wrote it for?
- Can you share the seven tenets highlighted in your book and explain what they are?
- As we close out 2025 and look toward the new year, what are two or three key principles you believe leaders need to embrace in order to adopt the mindset required for future-proofing their businesses, especially given that many leaders are still operating with pre-COVID thinking?
- Based on the work you’ve done with your clients and the organizations you’ve researched, is there a company you believe has truly mastered this—one that’s been able to connect the dots across the key elements you just mentioned?
- Now, can you share with our listeners, what’s the one online resource, tool, website or application that you absolutely can’t live without in your business?
- As an avid reader who finishes at least a book a week, is there a particular book that has had a significant impact on you—whether something you read recently or one that influenced you long ago?
- Could you share with our listeners, what’s the one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about, either something you’re working on to develop yourself or your people.
- Where to connect with Jean-Pierre online?
- Now, before we close our episodes out, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you’ll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason, you get derailed or you get off track, the quote kind of helps to get you back on track. Do you have one of those?
Highlights
Jean-Pierre’s Journey
Me: Now, Jean-Pierre, before we begin, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about your journey. I know we read your bio, but we always like to hear the guests explain and share with us how they got from where they were to where they are today.
Jean-Pierre shared that his life started in Germany. His father was in the Air Force. So, he grew up on an Air Force Base in Germany at Lars and Baden and Baden, those are two cities, and then they came back to Canada when he was 7. And his father is a serial entrepreneur, so he got into selling televisions just when televisions were taking off and appliances. And when he sold that business, he got into farming, gardening, to be specific. And so, he grew up being a gardener for about half his life, and he decided that getting up at 5:00 am in the morning to work the fields and going to bed at 10 o’clock when the sun went down, was really not something he wanted to do.
And so, he went to Sheridan College in Toronto and got a degree in graphic design and graduated 1978. Within two years, he started his own company. His first company was called Boulevard Communication, and they became one of Canada’s largest marketing design firms and one of the largest also in North America. And then that didn’t last long. About 10 years, it was like the Beatles split up, they had too many egos under the same house, and she started Shikatani LaCroix with one of the junior partners at Shikatani, and then he bought him out 10 years in the making of the company SLD. And so, he’s been running this company now for 36 years, of which he was sole proprietary for 26.
Exploring the Purpose, Inspiration, and Impact of ThinkBlink Manifesto
Me: Now, you are also an author, and your book is right up there on the screen with you. Could you share a little bit about your book that you published? ThinkBlink Manifesto. What is it about? Why did you write it? What inspired you? Who is it geared towards, and how can it help the persons that you wrote it for?
Jean-Pierre shared that the book was written last year. This is his third book, self-published books, his third one. The first book was Belonging Experiences, which is really the doorway to aspiring is to have a sense of community. And today that’s even more important, and it now forms part of the chapter in the ThinkBlink book. His second book was called Desire by Design. If you go on Amazon, don’t get confused with the one that’s about sex. This is about branding.
And then he wrote this book because they coined the phrase the Blink Factor in 1993 working on a project with Pizza Hut. And then in 1996 they registered it in North America, The Blink Factor. And they wanted to take the model that they’ve over the years, been creating, you talked about the Trust Ladder and the Omni Experience Model, take these tools that they created helping organizations manage their transformation and put in a book so that future generations, their employees, their clients and future clients can understand how they do things and what makes their company unique and their processes unique.
But more importantly, the reason he wrote this book is he’s been seeing over the years this fixation and AI is going to make it even worse, this fixation on functional attributes. Everything’s about features and benefits or promotions and price discounts, when really the consumer doesn’t buy that way.
They buy through their hearts, and the best way to get to the customer’s pocketbook, he always says, is through their heart. And their heart is about emotional connections. And how do you deliver and connect emotionally with your audience.
It’s about these seven tenets that they’ve outlined in the book, and each tenet builds on each other to form this ecosystem of building these emotionally engaged brands, and that was the nucleus of why he wrote the book.
He was tired having discussions in meetings going, “Okay, that’s great. These are all the features.” But what is the key feeling you want to create with your product? And stare, look, what do you mean feeling? When the consumer consumes your product or uses your product or drives your product, what kind of a feeling do you want to generate?
Because the leading brands own a feeling like Volvo owns safety, Staple owns easy, TD owns comfort. What is that one emotive word that you want to own as a brand? And most companies struggle with that.
They’ll have a list they call values or personalities, but that’s not the emotional connection that they’re looking for, and so that’s what drove him to write the book and to have it published and have meetings like you, so that we can start this shift of narrative, from the transactional to the emotional, from the functional to the emotive.
The Seven Core Tenets of the ThinkBlink Manifesto
Me: And if you were to share with us those seven tenets that the book permeates, what would those tenets be?
Jean-Pierre shared that the first tenet is the foundation of everything. The first tenet is, what is that Emotional Equity you own, or equities you own?
What is it that you connect emotionally with your audience that’s relevant to them? And how’s that emotion differentiate from your competitions?
And how can you amplify that through all your communication touch points?
So, the first one is, Own that Emotional Moment. How do you make your customers feel? What are those equities that are unique to you, that are relevant to your audience?
Tenet number two is building on that is, how do you translate that we call Personification of the Value, the emotional value proposition?
How do you translate that into design?
And design isn’t just aesthetics, design is, what’s the journey, what is the interaction, what are the friction points we need to eliminate?
Because we know that you can’t get emotionally connected with your audience if the journey, they’re undertaking to connect with you is full of problems, full of friction points, full of frustrations. How do you say, “Are you having a beautiful day? No, I’m having a terrible day,” because your experience is terrible. Well, how do you then overcome that and connect emotionally? So, design plays a really critical tool design thinking, solving through design.
The third tenet is about Communicating a Story. So, how do you take that value and unionize that story? Because as human beings, we’ve learned through storytelling. From the day of the stone age, humankind have learned and educated themselves through storytelling. And so, what is the brand story you want to instill towards your employees and your customers that link to tenant number one?
Tenet number four is really Understanding Who are Your Key Target Group. Now that you’ve done the story, who are you’re appealing to, and it’s going to go beyond demographics and psychographics, what’s their lifestyle? What do they do every day? How do they interact with different retailers or different brands? What’s their attitude? How are they feeling, and how do you map that into what we call personas. So, that’s tenant number four.
Tenet number five, which was his first book that he wrote, Creating Belonging Experiences, because we know that we’re creatures of habit. We’re also creatures of communities. We strive; we’re part of the communities. And it’s so funny, the word of the year this year will be belonging. And no matter where he goes, he’s reading, “Our brand needs to have a sense of belonging. Our employees need to have a sense of community and belonging.” And that’s really important, because with the level of anxiety we have today, which is right off the Richter scale, they just did a study on loneliness, it’s become now a serious health issue in North America. You think social media and technology would make us more connected; they’ve actually isolated us more. And so, that is belonging. That’s tenant number five.
Tenet number six is Measuring What Matters. And so, most organizations measure functional things, customer satisfaction, product acceptance, sales, frequency of visits, depth of wallet, all these great mathematical and functional left brain thinking metrics, and they’re important. Don’t get him wrong. They’re the foundation. But what we learned is they’re not the ones that differentiate you. They’re the ones that allow you to stay in business, but they’re not the ones that are going to drive growth.
The ones that drive growth are emotional equities.
How did you make them feel?
How does your brand align to their lifestyle?
How do they feel fulfilled using your product?
All of these key metrics that historically were hard to track, but with AI and digital technology now, your phone now is a sentiment computer. It judges your sentiments, you don’t know, but it is. It judges the sentiment in your voice. And banks now are using that technology on their phone service, your customer service lines understand what’s the sentiment of the person writing or calling in, and how do we understand how to mitigate that level of anxiety?
And the last tenet is Future Proofing. So, most organizations are judged quarterly. And there’s a big controversy that the company shouldn’t be evaluated. They shouldn’t be tracking quarterly. They should be tracking annually, he’ll put that aside. The reality is that organizations need to future proof their brand. They need to look at what are the different scenarios of disruption that we need to mitigate? They, as a company, predicted the pandemic 18 months before it happened. They were ready. They were already doing remote work and remote servers before it even happened. But how do you future proof your brand against these disruptions? What about if there’s a war? What about if there’s another pandemic which is going to happen? What are the strategies companies like, there’s a shortage now of minerals and all kinds, how are you going to mitigate these issues? And that’s a tenet number seven, which is future proofing your brand. So, they all come together.
Key Leadership Principles for Future-Proofing Businesses Beyond Pre-COVID Thinking
Me: Now, Jean-Pierre, you work with a lot of different brands, and leadership is very important in an organization. As we close out 2025 and we embark on a new year, what are maybe two or three overarching tenets that you believe a leader needs to have to embrace the kind of mindset that we would need to even focus on a lot of the things that you talk about in your book, ThinkBlink Manifesto. I think the concepts are brilliant, but I just don’t feel like all leaders in organizations are there, especially that last part where you spoke about future proofing your business, some people are still operating with a mindset pre-COVID. They’re not even post Covid yet. So, how do you even get them to even think that that level of disruption? Because it will come, as you said, and we have to kind of be in that space to embrace it.
Jean-Pierre stated that the first thing they can do is, come tomorrow, they’re going to be able to go to their website, and they have launched an AI, Think Link AI Assessment tool. It allows companies to assess through; they have proprietary data. They’ve been doing research on this subject for the last 10 years across North America, actually, globally. They have a database of proprietary research, plus proprietary evaluations based on the tenet factors, the seven tenets plus they have access through this platform to search the world for things like annual reports, NPS scores, employee satisfaction levels, social media, all of these factors that gives you a holistic view of the company, and it ranks the company versus one of its competitors on the seven tenet scores. And it gives you not only how you rank and why you rank that way, but it gives you a recipe and strategies to fill those gaps that are that you’re missing. So that’d be the first thing that I would think. Understanding where we are in connecting emotionally with our audience, we have the right metrics in place. Have we future proofed our brand? And so, having this assessment really opens the eyes to organizations and how they they’re viewed, versus their competition, number one.
Number two is most organizations now, because COVID has accelerated this are really focusing on a sense of belonging for the employees. So, employee empowerment, they just finished a couple of major programs for a petroleum company and an insurance company. It’s really understanding, how do we create a sense of belonging? Because we’re asking our employees to come back to work, we’re disrupting their lifestyles. There’s a lot of challenges from the standpoint of the economy, salaries, cost of living, the ability of owning a house, all these factors come to play in impacting how employees engage with their customers, but also how they engage with their other employees. And so, he would say organizations need to go deep into the sense of belonging would be the tenet that he would say start there. If you haven’t done the emotional one, at least build a bridge by focusing on the sense of belonging, creating a strong sense of community within your company, but also creating a sense of community and engagement, a two-way communication with your customers. Because they have learned, did this big study for the food service industry, and what they found out is this, that the brands that are leading the industry are brands that have a strong sense of community, and 57% of consumers they studied in North America indicated that they’re more loyal to an organization that demonstrates a commitment to the community, and not only the community, from a standpoint of customers and neighborhoods, but community of employees, to how they treat their employees. And so, he would start there. So, that’d be point number two.
And point number three, what gets measured, gets done, what gets rewarded, gets repeated. So, he’d say, go look at your metrics. The assessment tool is going to open up some new ways of looking at how you measure things, go back and look at your metrics, because he knows organizations, once they’ve instilled a new sense of metrics, it’s going to shift their behaviour, it’s just a natural process that if you measure emotional equities of your brand, if you start measuring how your employees are feeling, if you start measuring the feeling your brand generates for your customers, it’s going to force you to rethink your performance, rethink how you go to market. That’s really important, because in their studies, there is a direct correlation between the performance of a company from an NPS score sales customer loyalty and the tenet scores companies who rank high on the tenet scores outperform the industry by two to one. And so, they’re leaders, and they’re leaders in many facets, not just sales.
Organizations That Exemplify Excellence in Integrating Future-Ready Business Principles
Me: Based on your work that you’ve done with your own clients or even organizations that you’ve done research on, is there any company that you believe has mastered that, they’ve been able to connect the dots between those different points that you just mentioned?
Jean-Pierre stated that there is, the Apples of the world. Everyone names Apple, he thinks they’re a great example of organization, but in Canada, he would say a Cineplex, they’re an innovator in the category. They create experiences for their guests, they’re very much focused on their staff engagement and loyalty. The industry has gone through some significant peaks and valleys and more peaks to come as people move from going to theaters to enjoying entertainment in their homes, he’d say Cineplex, they’re truly an innovator in the category around the world that people come to Canada to look at what they’re doing. So, he’d say Cineplex would be a great example.
Harley Davidson is another one, he doesn’t own a motor motorbike, but they created a cult. And he thinks one of the key factors of belonging is if you can create a cult following for your brand, you’ve achieved the ultimate sense of belonging.
This is a question he would have to the audience, are your customers willing to put a tattoo on their body with your brand name? Are your employees willing to put a tattoo on their body?
He was speaking at a restaurant conference in Palm Springs last week, and there was a local pizza chain President talking about, it was Ampersand and pizza, which started in New York, and they’re very much a community driven, they emulate the Blink Factor, but part of the onboarding for the employees is they’re offered a free tattoo. So, there you go.
App, Website or Tool that Jean-Pierre Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Jean-Pierre shared that for the audience, if you go to www.sld.com and you go under insights, and you scroll down to resources, they have about 20 resources. These are how to exercises. If you want to position your firm, want to define the value proposition, if you want to do a SWOT analysis or apply the Trust Ladder, all of these tools, what’s the right type of research you should do. They’re all available there, they’re sharing 35 years of experience of the things to do and the things not to do in the resource section. And so, I would tell them, start there.
But for him, he’s a ferocious reader, he reads a book a week. He stated that he’s fortunate, he’s French Canadian, and he grew up speaking French and only French, but he went to an English college or university, Sheridan, and what they did is they put him into the English immersion course to teach him English. And one of those courses, which was phenomenal with speed reading. So, when he looks at college and high school, the two courses that have benefited him even today is speed reading and typing. He learned how to type on a typewriter, so it makes a lot easier to write a book. So, he would say reading read. And it’s so sad, so few people read. When he interviews an employee and he say, “So, where do you get your inspirations?” “Well, I go online. I look at blogs and this and that.” “Do you read a book?” “No, I don’t read books.” So many people don’t read books.
All that wealth of knowledge, not because he wrote a book, but all that wealth and knowledge that could elevate their careers and their experience and their knowledge, they’re not leveraging. And it’s kind of sad.
Books that Have Had a Great Impact on Jean-Pierre
Me: On the topic of reading, my next question is, I’m sure, as you mentioned before, you’re a ferocious reader, and you read at least a book a week. But is there any that have stood out for you? Maybe one that has had a really great impact on you? Could have been one you read a very long time ago, or even one that you’ve read recently.
When asked about books that have an impact, Jean-Pierre stated Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, and that book to him, really changed the mindset of what is possible and like his book, a process that companies can take to define their own blue ocean. And a blue ocean, like we also got white space. Blue ocean is an area that your competitors are not, that you can own that drives value and changes your entire business model for growth. So, for him, it was a very inspirational book.
And the other one was The Challenger Mindset: Unleashing Your Potential. This is a book that talks about silver vein. How do you communicate? How do you bring insights to the marketplace? The reality is, there’s so much information now available online, like he writes a blog a day, so you’d imagine the amount of content that’s available. There’s too much. And so, how do you bring a fresh perspective? And that book really does a good job.
And then the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness is a book on behavioral science. We have behavioral scientists on staff. How do we nudge, we’re creatures of habit, how do we change our bad habits to good habits? How do we get consumers to look at this brand versus the other brand? It’s all about nudging them.
What Jean-Pierre is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something he’s really excited about is, Jean-Pierre shared that he’s a grandfather, he’s got a grandson, Marcus, who’s 9 months old, and seeing the world through his eyes brings back a sense of humanity, a sense of value and purpose and importance on being human. So, that would definitely top other topics. But he thinks the other one is, he’s looking forward, he got invited to speak again at financial brands forum in Las Vegas next year, he’d say it’s the largest banking conference in the world, and it’s like going to the Academy Awards. It’s really an honour and a privilege to be invited to be a keynote speaker. So, he’s looking forward to that, and it’s all about wealth and the transfer of wealth between his generation and his daughter’s generation.
Connect with Jean-Pierre Online
LinkedIn – Jean-Pierre LaCroix
LinkedIn – ThinkBlink Newsletter
Website – www.sld.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jean-Pierre Uses
When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Jean-Pierre shared that he created one, “Leadership is about seeing the opportunity and the challenges versus the challenges in the opportunity.” How many times have we been faced with, “Oh, this is a great opportunity. Oh, but I can’t do you know, we’ll have problems doing it this way. We’ll have problems doing that way. Maybe it won’t happen.” And people psych themselves out before really giving it a try. And leadership is about seeing the opportunities and the challenges. Because that’s hard, but it’s where true insights emerge through breakthrough innovation emerges.
Me: Jean-Pierre, thank you so much for coming on our podcast, Navigating the Customer Experience, sharing about your organization SLD, sharing about the 7 tenets in your book, ThinkBlink Manifesto. And just how organizations can really as you mentioned, find a very emotive way to connect with their customers. As you mentioned, what stood out to me most in your conversation was, are you so connected to this brand that you’d actually get the brand tattooed on yourself? You want them to be die-heart loyal evangelists that they would walk and spread good news about your business, and of course there is no way that that can happen if those interactions with your company are not ones that make them feel good, that create good feelings, good emotions. I thought it was really, really great, the perspective that you brought to our show, and I hope our listeners that tapped into this episode will be able to take out some nuggets that they can take into their organization and make their business and experiences for their customers that much better, so thank you much.
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Links
- ThinkBlink Manifesto: Creating Deep, Lasting Emotional Brand Connections in the Blink of an Eye by Jean-Pierre LaCroix
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim
- The Challenger Mindset: Unleashing Your Potential by Joy Y
- Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler
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