Customer Experience

Branding is dead. Long live the brand!

I’d suggest that alot of what I do as Strategy Director at DNA is customer experience design. Simplistically if you design and deliver customer experiences you are branding.

“Brand” is all the past, present and future associations about an organisation that have some value in the eyes of the customer.

“Branding” is designing, building and operating everything in the present thereby creating positive memories and valuable future promises. 

Customer experience is the interaction between a person and a business at any number of touchpoints. If you design and deliver customer experiences you are branding. So they are one and the same or another term for the same thing.

The problem with this thinking is that it is completely wrong. 

Here are some quite revealing stats I came across when prepping for a presentation at the Customer Experience Management conference last week:

1. From Bruce Temkin: 90% of senior executive respondents think that customer experience is very important or critical to their strategy and 80% want to use customer experience as a form of differentiation.
2. From Fournaise: 75% of all CEOs believe marketers lack credibility and 77% feel that despite marketers talking about brand, brand values, brand equity and other similar parameters, top management has difficulties linking it back to results that really matter: revenues, sales and even market valuation. 67% think that unlike CFOs and Sales, marketers don’t think enough like businesspeople: they focus too much on the creative, “arty” and “fluffy” side of marketing and not enough on its business science, and rely too much on their ad agencies to come up with the next big idea

So, customer experience is real observable interactions between the business and people, quantifiable, meaningful, impactful and business-like. Branding is a misnomer generally confused with logo design and advertising, controlling aesthetics, form and communication. 

Clearly there are big perception problems with brand and branding and people who undertake this in the mind of senior executives who allocate scarce resources in organisations.

How do we (marketers and brand designers and builders) secure a share of scarce resources to design and deliver a strong branded experience? How do we get experiences that are ‘brand-led’? How does the customer experience create brand equity and value? 

Here are five tips to consider to make headway against this issue:

1. Rethink the concept and execution of brand and marketing in the organization
2. Do better brand visioning that helps and leads customer experience design
3. Really truly engage the employees at the frontline
4. Rethink the hard numbers around brand
5. Shoot the mule which is “branding”!

For more on this check out McKinsey Quarterly for an article on the future of branding and then give us a call and we’ll take you through the full presentation I made to the Customer Experience Management conference.