Great Customer Experience is the Ultimate Brand Experience - Top 100 UK

Hot on the heals of my last post, about the most admired customer experience companies in USA, I came across a Marketing Week article this week highlighting the top 100 UK brands for customer experience (survey by Nunwood).

Here is the ranking:

1. Amazon

2. John Lewis

3. Virgin Atlantic

4. Emirates

5. Marks & Spencer

6. M&S Simply Food

=7. Millies Cookies

=7. Greggs

9. Hilton
10. Krispy Kreme

The Marketing Week article then makes an important statement:

"Great customer service is the ultimate brand experience. Consumers on the receiving end of a positive retail experience may spend more than they intend, come back for more and tell their friends."

Absolutely. ..

This is what I go on about all the time.

The success of these brands is clear evidence that building an organisation that is capable of delivering winning brand experiences at every stage of the consumer journey is a winning strategy.

If you are serious about achieving success like these brands than consider the consumer experience at every stage of the Path to Purchase and think how you can WOW them.

Also, check-out the Marketing Week article because it has a number of interesting insights into the actions of some of the top 100 brands.

Here are some examples:

"John Lewis encourages consumers to interact with the brand through well-trained store staff" 

"People find that the Richer Sounds staff are concerned about meeting their needs rather than selling the most expensive item" 

"Virgin’s staff are generally felt to be fantastic....Virgin has become a customer service case study for other brands aiming to humanise their operations" 

"We have found that what people love about Millie’s Cookies is the variety, choice, personalisation and the fact that we don’t come across as a big corporate brand" http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/analysis/features/the-brands-that-run-rings-around-their-rivals/3030720.article

Brand Experiences to get a brand Chosen

Choose is the second stage of the Path to Advocacy and is about the process that the consumer goes through when choosing which brand(s) they are likely to buy.

This stage is about getting your brand onto the consumers’ short-list.

This used to be all about traditional media - using high impact, coverage, frequency, recency, etc. However, the internet now means i) consumers are very interconnected with each other, and ii) the way they behave and use media has changed. They don’t trust traditional media in the same way, they research differently (usually on-line) and actively seek relevant opinion/advice of others (e.g. friends & family and/or independent experts).

To succeed today brand owners must deeply understand their target consumers’ behaviours, particularly:

a) How and where consumers are getting information about brands

b) The consumers’ motivations for choosing. (These can be driven by functional needs e.g. specification, colour, price, etc and their emotional needs.)

The start point for marketers is making sure their brand is providing the right (usually functional) information, at the right time, in the right place. Effective ways to do this is include sampling or a good internet strategy (e.g. search, brand website, etc).

The other critical requirement is about making the brand relevant to the target consumers’ lives. It is where PR (Virgin, Marks & Spencer, Agent Provocateur), experiential (Electrolux), social media (Dell, Wispa, T-Mobile) and advocacy can play a big part.

Full marks to Marks & Spencer

M&S in UK has (rightly) been getting a rough ride from newspapers and social media because they were charging ‘larger’ customers extra for DD size bras.

I don't shop that much at M&S (and never buy bras there!) but, like most people in UK, I have great affection for them. I guess the coverage could have started to erode this affection.

Last week they ran a ‘We Boobed’ ad admitting that they got it wrong.

It reminded me of how Richard Branson cleverly handled a serious letter of complaint from a very unhappy flier. [read story here]

M&S are a smart brand organisation. They read the signals well and decided to do a u-turn.

Good move.

Their sensible handling of this issue turned a potential business disaster into a positive brand experience for us bystanders in this issue.

I smiled when I saw it.

That must be a good thing for the M&S brand.