Chapter 13

Perfecting Your Brand Experience

In This Chapter

Generating organization-wide brand buy-in

Creating brand champions

Developing and delivering a great brand experience

People power brands.

Brands are made or broken by human encounters that either advance or erode brand promises. The difference between well-launched brands that fizzle and well-managed brands that soar to great value lies in the customer’s brand experience, which is the result of everyday contact with your name, your product, your organization, and, most of all, your people.

A great brand name, logo, promise, and communication program are essential ingredients for brand success, but to hit a branding home run you need a committed team of brand champions who embody your brand and who consistently deliver a brand experience worthy of customer praise and loyalty.

The brand experience runs from a person’s very first encounter with your brand through the pre-purchase experience, the purchase process, and post-purchase, when brand contacts take the form of product usage, customer service, repeat purchases, and ongoing encounters with your brand. As you develop your brand experience, this chapter outlines the game plan to follow.

Making an Organization-Wide Commitment to Your Brand

Great brands need great leaders. Leading a great brand takes courage and decisiveness. It requires commitment to the brand promise, discipline to build an organization around fulfillment of the promise, and perseverance to keep the promise through all customer contacts and market conditions.

The person whose name sits at the very top of your organizational chart needs to be your brand’s evangelist-in-chief.

• If that person is you, be prepared to serve as your brand’s primary champion, your organization’s brand coach, the mirror of your brand’s promise, and the driving force behind the quality of your customer’s brand experience.
• If that person is your boss, gain top-tier involvement before taking another step in the branding process. Without buy-in from the person on the highest rung of the management ladder, your brand will never reach its potential.

Great brands reflect values and commitments that reach from the most visible leader all the way to the core of an organization. They’re embodied by brand representatives and by enthusiastic customers who don’t just buy the brand. They own the brand.

Writing your branding playbook

To make branding an organization-wide commitment, take three steps:

1. Clearly communicate your organization’s mission and vision.

   Your mission defines what you intend to do and the approach you’ll follow to achieve your aspirations. Your vision defines why your company does what it does and the ultimate good you aim to achieve through your success. Together your mission and vision orient all who work with your organization to the ultimate aim you’re working toward and the route you’ll take to get there. For help putting your statements into words, see Chapter 6.

2. Build organization-wide understanding for your brand statement.

   Your brand statement encapsulates what you do, those you serve, how you differ from similar solutions, and the promise you make to all who deal with your organization.

3. Make your brand promise an organization-wide commitment.

   Your brand promise is the statement upon which you stake your reputation. It’s the essence of your brand and the quality you assure to all who come into contact with your organization. Be sure that your entire team knows the promise they’re helping to keep.

True brand culture stems from the beliefs, personalities, and values of those leading the brand. It’s so authentic and heartfelt that it’s caught, not taught, throughout the organization.

You can’t impose your brand mission or promise onto employees. We’ve heard about companies that assemble their staffs to recite the mission statement each morning (or worse, to sing it in staff meetings — believe it or not, we’ve seen this firsthand, much to the embarrassment of the assembled employees). The only way to gain company-wide buy-in is to start with buy-in at the top and to spread it with such enthusiasm that a strong sense of culture naturally follows.

To test how well your promise is known, embraced, and implemented in your organization, answer the questions posed in Figure 13-1.

Becoming your brand’s MVP

“Walk the talk” may sound like an overused phrase, but it’s a tenet that could be far better employed in today’s business world.

How many times have you entered a business that promises friendly service only to stand around waiting for someone to look up and recognize your existence? How many times have you been assured by a company’s communications that “to us, you’re a name, not a number” only to place a phone call that burns ten minutes in an automated menu maze that repeatedly requests your account number, interspersed by blasé background music and an occasional prerecorded voice reminding you that your call is important?

Following are some suggestions for developing organization-wide passion for and commitment to your brand promise:

• Keep the same promise that you make to your customers with your employees. If you promise customers friendly service, promise your employees a friendly employment setting. If you promise the highest-quality offering, promise your employees the highest-quality work environment. If you promise a super-creative product, promise employees super-creative work surroundings. Let employees and customers experience the same brand promise.
• Make your work environment a mirror image of your brand experience. If you promise that customers are served by your full business team, break down the barriers of cubicles and closed doors to create an atmosphere of teamwork. If you promise the most creative solutions, foster a creative work environment (no uniforms, please!). We heard of an ad agency that took its creativity promise so far as to say they wouldn’t hold company gatherings at an establishment that served sugar in cubes — a sign of regulated servings and traditional delivery that ran counter to the agency’s culture and promise.
• Be sure your brand promise starts at the top and runs through to the core of your organization. Make an organization-wide commitment to your brand promise, and then make every business decision with the promise in mind, including decisions about how you’ll create a work environment, employee training, and employee rewards that help you walk the talk of your brand promise within your organization.

Suiting Up a Team of Brand Champions

If you’re launching a new brand, before your brand makes its public debut, prepare all players for their roles. Follow the step-by-step advice in Chapter 9, which covers the topic of training and inspiring your staff.

If you’re managing an existing brand, your training needs are twofold: To recruit and train new employees into the brand culture and to enhance and reward commitment to the brand among existing employees.

What everyone in your organization needs to know about your brand

When training employees to be brand champions, make sure they understand the market position, promise, and character of the brand they represent.

• Presenting your brand’s market position: Put your brand on a map using a device such as the positioning matrix (shown in Chapter 5) to illustrate and gain understanding for the unique place your brand holds in its market.
• Promoting your brand promise: Describe how your organization delivers on its promise at every point of the customer’s brand experience. Cite examples for how the promise is upheld upon arrival by phone, in person, or online; in correspondence and email; in marketing materials; at the point of customer purchase, billing, or service; and even when handling concerns and complaints. Turn to Chapter 6 as you define your brand attributes and write your business promise.
• Conveying your brand character: Your brand character is the personality of your brand that’s reflected through the look and voice of your brand expressions.

  Especially if people have face-to-face contact with your brand, the people you employ are the most important representatives of your brand character. If you convey one brand character in marketing communications and then deliver service through a staff member who reflects a completely different character, you’re in line for a credibility train wreck. The following are ways to train your staff members to represent your brand character:

  • During orientation, explain your brand character as a look and voice — a personality — that’s based on your organization’s values, vision, and brand promise.
  • Explain that every employee represents the brand character. Describe your brand character in a statement such as, “Our brand character is [a description using words that you’d use to describe the personality of your brand if it were a person or a car; for instance, sophisticated, fashionable, revolutionary, innovative, professional, elegant, or refined]. We reflect our character through brand expressions that are [a description of the mood, voice, and tone that your marketing will project; for example, chic and stylish, cutting-edge creative, calm and subdued, high-quality and professional].
  • Define how your organization manages its brand character through company dress, customer contact, office décor, correspondence, background music, aroma, color, and any other way that the personality of your organization is expressed. Create policies where appropriate, but focus on creating a brand promise and culture that runs so deeply that employees naturally adopt it as their own.

  For an example of pervasive brand character, walk through the lobby of a W Hotel. The brand describes itself as “W … for warm, wonderful, witty, wired, welcome.” More than words, though, the brand expresses its identity at every presentation point, especially through employees — called talent — who, within weeks of joining the hotel team, seem to transform their looks to represent W’s “young, hip” culture.

Gaining team buy-in

To win staff understanding and enthusiasm for your brand, treat brand training as a function worthy of time and effort by doing the following:

• Stage a formal brand training session that presents the following:
  • A snapshot history of your organization
  • A description of your market and how you provide the best solution to the customer’s wants or needs
  • Your brand definition
  • Your brand’s unique position in your competitive arena
  • Your brand’s distinguishing attributes and how they translate into meaningful customer benefits
  • Your brand’s character and how it’s reflected through employees and at each customer contact point
  • How your brand is key to your business success
• Immerse staff members in your brand culture. Arrange for new employees to experience your brand as a customer does, beginning with a review of marketing materials and moving through contact with all departments. Help each employee see how various employees uphold the brand promise and exceed customer expectations.
• Arrange opportunities for employees to watch others make brand presentations. Let them see how the brand is described and translated into customer benefits.
• Make brand training an ongoing effort. Periodically ask employees questions such as
  • Which brand attributes do you think customers most appreciate?
  • From your encounters with customers or from your vantage point within our organization, do you think our customers understand our brand’s distinctions and how we differ from competitors?
  • If you were one of our primary competitors, how might you describe the greatest weakness of our brand?
  • What one customer contact point seems to you to be least effective at conveying our brand promise?
  • If you could wave a magic wand and fix one thing that causes customer frustration or erodes brand confidence, what would it be?
• Give employees authority to go the extra mile to keep brand promises, and reward them for their innovation and responsiveness. Nordstrom is a shining example of an empowered team of confident brand champions who are encouraged to use their own good instincts to offer customized solutions, to right wrongs when they see them, and to go overboard to deliver a great customer experience. The result? Passionate customers who spread the good word with far greater impact than any company-generated communication could achieve.
• Regularly ask yourself and your staff: What kinds of stories are customers telling about our service?

  If you’re not totally proud of what you believe is being said about you, spend extra time with the upcoming section on developing an outstanding customer experience.

Building Brand Trust at the Point of Sale

The best brand owners make sure that salespeople are steeped in brand culture and armed with tools and scripts that help them share and inspire belief in the brand promise.

For example, Victoria’s Secret sells underwear, but salespeople know that what people are really buying is the idea of sexy romance. Harley Davidson sells motorcycles, but people are really buying association with an independent and rebellious spirit.

Even more than your product, it’s your brand promise that inspires your customer’s purchase decision. So arm your sales team with scripts for sharing your story, brand testimonials and endorsements, techniques for overcoming objections, and approaches for negotiating terms and closing sales without ever varying from the brand message and promise.

Developing and sharing brand testimonials, endorsements, and reviews

At the moment of purchase decision, customers need a final hit of inspiration and reassurance that the brand’s offering will deliver as promised. This is true when customers are purchasing in-person and even more essential when they’re purchasing from websites or mobile apps that guide their choices.

To underscore that a branded product is as good as it’s touted to be, amass positive reviews, testimonials, and endorsements.

Personal testimonials

When obtaining and presenting customer testimonials, follow these tips:

• Wait until purchase transactions are completed before asking a satisfied buyer if he or she would say a few words on behalf of your brand.
• Encourage frank comments. Even if the words aren’t suitable for a testimonial, they’ll be valuable as you refine your offering and brand experience.
• Whether customers speak or write their comments, ask them to focus on the aspect of their experience that they found most compelling. Whether they cite service, product selection, convenience, guarantee, or after-sale assistance, specific praise makes the comments more believable.
• Ask customers to describe details about their experiences. Consider the difference in impact between, “I’m impressed by your willingness to go the extra mile” and “We were leaving town and needed to pick up our new widget late on a Thursday evening. We still can’t believe that you worked long past closing hours and then made our pick-up unnecessary by delivering the widget to our doorstep. Thanks!”
• Obtain written permission to use the testimonial. Then identify the praise with at least the customer’s first name, hometown, title, and business affiliation if possible and appropriate.

When dealing with customer testimonials, avoid these mistakes:

• Never offer cash, product, or favors in return for customer testimonials.
• Don’t invent testimonials. They’re likely to sound phony (which they are), and the practice is unethical and sometimes illegal.
• Don’t prompt customers. Let them speak freely. You want to collect genuine opinions about how they view the attributes and benefits of your offering and the experience of dealing with your organization.

Celebrity endorsements

Celebrity endorsements link star-powered statements of support (increasingly in the form of social-media mentions) with brands that somehow match up with the celebrity’s personality and reputation — for a price. Usually celebrity endorsements are purchased with cash, product, or stock options.

Consider these points when using celebrities in your brand-building program:

• The most credible endorsements convince people that a respected personality uses and benefits from your offering.
• The best celebrity representatives align perfectly with your brand image and actually use and support your offerings. Aim for a relationship that goes beyond endorsement and involves product usage and affinity.
• Celebrity endorsements are worthy of legal contracts that define the relationship, the compensation, and what happens should the celebrity’s integrity be damaged by scandal. Don’t proceed on a handshake.

Expert endorsements

When experts test, evaluate, and offer positive opinions on products, the endorsements are valuable in developing consumer confidence as long as you follow a few precautions:

• The expert must have clear and well-recognized qualifications.
• The expert must conduct a product test that conforms to testing standards in your industry. If the test proves that your offering is superior to a competitor’s offering, keep records that support the claim.
• The expert must have no relationship with your business, or if a relationship exists, you must describe the relationship in all materials that reference the test.

Organization endorsements

An organization endorsement is a seal of approval from a reputable organization. The Good Housekeeping Seal is a well-known example.

Feature endorsements only from actual, independent organizations that have credibility with your target audience, never from organizations created solely for use in your marketing program. Always check with the organization about how you may use the endorsement and what restrictions apply.

Customer reviews

Customers post reviews for all kinds of products and services at review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, CitySearch, and other networks. At many sites, the difference between a four-star or four-and-a-half-star rating can cause dramatic swings in customer decisions.

Nearly every business benefits from positive reviews and is susceptible to damage from bad reviews. Don’t leave it to chance. Claim presence for your business on the review sites prospective customers are likely to check out. Encourage customers to post good words. And keep your cool but double your efforts when an occasional bad review shows up. See Chapter 11 for steps to follow and mistakes to avoid.

Spreading the good word

Gain mileage out of good words by presenting them in the following ways:

• Provide testimonials and endorsements in sales presentations. Share praise from past customers as well as details on expert test results.
• Include accolades in sales letters and literature. Intersperse testimonials and endorsements with sales points rather than isolate testimonials to a single page.
• Feature testimonials on your website and social-media pages. On your website, create a page of testimonials and endorsements, but also incorporate them throughout your site. On social media, share phrases from positive comments, with thanks, as posts or status updates.

Intercepting and overcoming objections

It sounds counterintuitive, but objections can open the door to brand-building opportunities. When customers share concerns or objections with your company’s representatives, at the very least they’re involved in the sales conversation and, at the most, they’re providing input that allows your company to clarify misunderstandings and overcome buying obstacles.

Most objections stem from one of three areas of concern.

• Lack of trust in your brand: Here’s where testimonials and endorsements can come to the rescue.
• Preference for a competing brand: Be ready with a recap of the benefits and value your brand delivers in order to present a positive comparison without taking any digs at competitors.
• Concern over your offer: Probe the concern and avoid jumping to the conclusion that price is the issue. Often concerns have as much to do with questions about ease of use, appropriateness of the offering, perceived risk in dealing with a new product or brand, or even lack of authority to make the purchase.
  • Price concerns: Demonstrate worth, present product value, show cost/value ratios, and show cost- or time-saving potential. Also provide purchase options — from trial offers to bulk discounts to special terms or installment plans — to address price barriers.
  • Time concerns: Demonstrate ease of use, installation, product adoption, training, or other time concerns.
  • Risk concerns: Demonstrate ease of use and make trial offers, no-risk guarantees, or service assurances to minimize perceived risk. Also, present testimonials, endorsements, and case studies that replace risk concerns with product assurances.

  In addition to dealing positively with concerns, log concerns so when it’s time to revitalize your brand, you know the kinds of issues to address.

Delivering a Brand-Building Experience

Be the brand isn’t just talk; it’s the key to branding success. Brand strategy doesn’t move markets, but brand experience does. To build the brand you want, create an experience that reaffirms your promise during every encounter with your brand.

Testing your brand experience

The first step in managing your brand experience is to experience your brand firsthand. How? Follow these suggestions:

• Arrive like customers arrive. Forget your insider shortcuts. Imagine you’re a first timer trying to reach your front door or website; see if your business is findable and accessible and what first impression it makes.
• Shop like they shop. Go through the buying experience exactly as a customer would. Ask to see samples, request cost estimates, and compare options both within your company and with competitors. Then go through the trial, customization, and purchase-decision process.
• Pause where they pause. Notice where and how long you wait during the purchase process. How long does it take to receive a greeting? Is the greeting appropriate? What do you do while you wait? Are you comfortable? Do you receive positive brand messages and an experience that fits your brand image and promise?
• Use your product just as customers use it. If they sign an estimate or a contract, notice how the information is presented, whether it’s perfectly clear or whether questions come to mind. If they have to unpackage or assemble your product, follow the instructions to see if they make sense. Dial your help line to check out your support functions. Then put the product to use to assess the user experience.

Use your findings and do the following to smooth the customer experience:

• Create a map of how customers arrive at, buy from, and follow up with your business. This information helps as you conduct your more formal brand experience audit (see the next section).
• Recognize and make plans to eliminate customer barriers, whether they’re physical (lack of parking), emotional (undue waits), or product-oriented (packaging is hard to open; instructions are confusing).
• Note and make plans to address opportunities for service or product enhancements. For example, if you find that customers are consistently tailoring your product to suit their particular needs, include customization as a free or low-cost option.

Auditing your brand experience

Brand experiences are the result of brand encounters, and brand encounters are affected by

• How easy it is to find and reach you in person, by phone, or online
• Your business location and appearance, including signage, displays, staff, waiting areas, and even the look of other customers
• The caliber and cleanliness of your business vehicles
• The quality of your advertising and other communications
• The nature of your publicity
• The look and speed of your website
• The speed of service, including the length of time phone calls are left on hold, how long messages go unanswered, and how long people wait in line or for product delivery
• The friendliness and experience of customer-service staff
• The flexibility of your policies

This list barely scratches the surface of the ways that people form impressions about your brand, but you get the idea. With so many encounter points, it’s no wonder that brands have trouble maintaining a consistent image. With each lapse, though, no matter how minor, consumers lose confidence in the brand’s ability to keep its promise and to maintain its distinction.

To develop the quality of your brand experience, take these steps:

1. Determine every brand impression point that prospects and customers encounter when dealing with your business, from the pre-purchase stage through the purchase experience and post-purchase contact. (The form in Figure 13-2 helps with this step.)
2. Create an experience that conveys your brand promise without fail or hesitation through encounters that consistently advance your brand message, voice, look, and character.
3. Audit your brand experience on a regular basis to insure against reputation-eroding communication or service lapses.
4. Take action immediately if you discover impression points that compromise the consistency and value of your brand.

Pre-purchase impressions

Pre-purchase impressions take the form of web searches, website visits, social-media posts and interactions, advertising, direct mail, displays, publicity, presentations, reviews, word-of-mouth comments, and more. Some you control; others are outside of your control. All contribute to awareness of your brand and its distinctions, market perceptions, and relevance to customer wants and needs.

Pre-purchase communications reach prospective, new, or lapsed customers with messages that, if all goes well, prompt inquiries, product sampling or trial, and, ultimately, purchases.

Purchase experience impressions

During the purchase process, people form impressions based on the location of your business, the design of your physical or online setting, the style and attitude of your employees (and even that of other customers), the design of your packaging, the nature of your pricing, your service style and systems, and the way they’re treated by sales and service staff.

This is the point when you want to reinforce your brand promise. You also want to heighten consumer confidence, overcome doubts, underscore brand distinctions and competitive advantages, build trust, and convey your product value and positive price-value relationship.

Post-purchase impressions

The best post-purchase impression comes from delivery of a branded product that matches or exceeds the customer’s quality and performance expectations.

The post-purchase experience also includes follow-up service, customer communications and engagement, loyalty programs, and customer events.

At each post-purchase encounter point, be sure the experience deepens your brand promise while also demonstrating appreciation, exceeding customer expectations, addressing customer needs, and encouraging involvement and brand ownership. How you handle compliments and concerns and how you encourage customer involvement to tailor the brand experience to their unique wants and needs tips the balance between satisfied customers and raving fans. (See Chapter 14 for information on this point.)

Making use of your findings

As you conduct your brand experience audit, use the worksheet in Figure 13-2 as a guide and follow these steps:

1. Identify all brand impression points.
2. Evaluate the strength of each impression point based on how well your organization currently performs and whether your performance has improved or slipped in the recent past.
3. Identify gaps between your brand promise and brand experience.
4. Prioritize which gaps need immediate attention based on the seriousness of the experience lapse and the prominence of the impression point.
5. Set improvement objectives, monitor progress, and reward your staff for performance advances.