What do people have to do with a brand strategy?
In short; EVERYTHING.
I’ve heard a lot of definitions of brands over the years. For me, any true definition has to do with feelings.
Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room – Jeff Bezos
A brand is an idea or a promise made to its target audience. It carries a unique identity and story that your customers will remember when they think about your company, your product or service. A brand is a promise, and you have to keep that promise in everything you do - Teri Llach, Forbes Council Member
Both of these definitions reference being MEMORABLE.
And what makes something memorable?
Emotions :)
Emotion affects all the phases of memory formation
This concept is explored in more details in a 2015 article in Psychology Today. The article states that, “the experience of emotion enhances our memories” and that, “emotion acts like a highlighter that emphasizes certain aspects of experiences to make them more memorable.”
Now, let me ask you this. When was the last time you had an emotional experience that did NOT include another human.
The movie Her aside, most people haven’t. Because we just don’t experience automated interactions the same way.
They might be good. They might be easy. But they DON’T create the same kind of emotional reactions. Which means, they may feel good in the short term, but they don’t turn into long term memories.
So, how do we incorporate the people into the experience?
It’s more than “customer service”, or even “customer experience”
One of the struggles with focusing on customer service alone to create these memorable brand experiences is that they are NOT the only people who are responsible for creating brand experiences. Marketing. Sales. HR. Operations. R&D. Delivery. Pick your industry, but there are always MULTIPLE points of brand experience happening. And focusing on ONE more often than not leads to a disjointed experience…which may be memorable, but not for the right reasons.
Quick Example: my parents recently purchased a play set for my son from a reputable brand. We only received French instructions, but my mom found some online ones in English that I downloaded. Only to realize that the two sets of instructions were NOT the same. My husband and brother-in-law started to put it together and at step 3 we found we were missing a whole set of screws. So, I audited the parts lists (again the two sets of instructions were different) and found we were missing TWO entire sets of screws (about 50 screws in total). So my dad called the customer service line and told them what we were missing. They said they would send them in the next 10 business days. When my parents received the package, only the English instructions were inside.
So, the marketing team did a great job of building a reputable brand in the market. The customer service team did a somewhat decent job of logging our issue and providing a solution. The operations team did not do a good job of executing the solution, or the communication between the teams was bad. Either way, what started out as a reputable brand, ended with a, “I’m not sure I’ll ever buy from them again”.
The disjointed experience breaks my expectations. It creates an emotion of frustration. And this becomes memorable for the WRONG reasons.
Be memorable for the RIGHT reasons
So, if a red emotion creates a bad experience, we need to create feelings for our customers in the green emotional range. Think happy, excited, safe, peaceful.
Notice I didn’t include “easy”. That’s because easy isn’t an emotion. Also, easy is in the eye of the beholder, and when we are trying to create experiences that are easy, we can only do it from our own point of view ;)
If one of your brand core values is “Happy Customers”, then you can make that the focus throughout the process.
Let’s say we’re evaluating the above experience with a focus on truly creating a HAPPY customer.
The marketing team is actually doing a decent job of creating the expectation that when you buy from this brand, it will create happiness for your children. CHECK.
Receiving all the required parts is a GIVEN. That does not in essence create happiness. But missing parts throws someone right into red emotions. Therefore, there really should be some more protocols in place to make sure pieces aren’t missing. [X]
Calling customer service is already an inconvenience. So, how can we turn an inconvenience into happiness? Empathy. And actually fixing the problem. So many customer experience teams have little to no autonomy to create a real solution for a customer. But when the people have the authority to “create happiness” by any means necessary (in a responsible way of course), the likelihood of a happy customer is much higher. [X]
When a team is executing a solution that is fixing an error, there should be protocol to ensure that there is not a secondary mess up. Inconvenience piled on top on inconvenience is NOT going to lead to a happy customer. The only thing that will is accurate execution. So, what policies are in place to ensure this? [X]
At the end of the day…
…who is responsible for executing the things that create happy customers? PEOPLE. People throughout the company who rarely (if ever) know the benefit of a job well done. Why? Because we haven’t built our organizations, cultures, and reward structures this way.
What if, all of the KPI’s in your company were related to creating Happy Customers (in this example). Or another one of your core brand values? And what if the people knew how they could show up, in alignment with their personal brands, to create that experience? What if leaders led with that experience in mind?
What if everyone was truly on the same page as to what your business was trying to accomplish?
Now THAT’S a brand strategy that works.
If you’re ready to get your team aligned, sign up for your Brand Leadership Campfire today!
