My favourite Brand Experience Matters posts

I can’t believe it has been just over one year since I started this blog.

114 posts later and I still have so much I want to say...

Anyway, as seems to be customary at the start of a New Year, I thought I would highlight what I think may be my top ten posts:

• Brand usage – the opportunity
• Brand experiences to get a brand chosen
• Brand experience is strategy, not a slogan
• Winning brands understand the power of emotion
• Importance of a brand experience culture
• Deliver customer brand experiences that build sales
• Advocacy must be a focus for the whole brand organisation, not just marketing
• Delight consumers. Show you care. Make them talk about you
• Marketing departments must look beyond just making the brand promise
• I’m a customer that has become the ad agency for Nikoi Island

Thanks for visiting my blog and come back soon.

Winning brands understand the power of emotion

It is well understood that delivering winning brand experiences that forge strong relationships with consumers is an effective way to build consumer loyalty and advocacy.

What may not be so well recognised is that emotion is a key ingredient of a winning brand experience.

Marketing & Strategy Innovation blog have just posted hard data that shows that emotional ads work better than rationale ads. However, ads are just one type of brand experience, and only part of the story

To be successful it is vital for brands to deliver: a) the promise [made in the carefully crafted ads] and b) experiences that delight consumers.

Without doubt the best way to deliver brand experiences with meaningful emotion is through the use of human contact.

Brand organisations should think carefully about how their people are dealing with consumers, and look for ways to build elegant brand experiences at every stage of the path to advocacy – particularly in-store and customer service.

There are plenty of brands that do this really well (Zappos, Hyundai, Virgin and Nordstrom). They are a smart place to start if you are looking for compelling examples about how to do it.

Brand experience is a strategy, not a slogan

I’ve borrowed (and slightly changed) this quote from an article in a new Peppers and Rodgers on-line journal

It is a great article; take a look [Customer Strategist]

It supports a number of points I've made before...

Delivering great brand experience will grow the bottom-line:

“.. several recent studies confirm the link between customer experience and bottom-line performance”

Emotion contact is more effective than rational communication. It’s about what you do and how you treat consumers, not what you say, that is more influential:

“Customers feel first and think second—and interactions with a company strongly influence their heart and produce a longer lasting impact than communications directed toward their heads.”

Training and culture are key:

“Many companies lack the employee training and automated processes necessary to create the insight, interaction, improvement, and orientation necessary for a successful customer experience program.”

“Simply revising structure and technology doesn't suffice; company culture has to be changed for improvement."

If you want to build a competitive advantage consider seriously how you can work with others in your organisation, maybe using the PDD framework, to find ways to deliver compelling and relevant brand experiences that will genuinely WOW consumers.