How to create a unique brand experience
Create a unique brand experience to win customers over and over again.
Over the last decade or so, retailers have taken purpose to heart, creating innovative, customer-centric stores and optimising state-of-the-art web shops to allow for personalised, seamless shopping and delivery. Purposeful brands know that developing a meaningful experience for their customers relies on connecting with them on a personal and emotional level, and knowing when enough is enough. Companies and brands must say what they mean and mean what they say.
It’s a mistake for anybody managing a brand to get swept up in the promise of technology. The PC has been the dominant platform for e-commerce for some time, however mobile devices are rapidly becoming the platform of choice. And while the rapid uptick in mobile use is phenomenal, many mobile users claim that, despite its convenience, the mobile experience offers inferior functionality.
While a benevolent gesture, it fails to recognise the unique needs of elderly people who use the bank as a touchpoint to connect with other people in a sociable, face-to-face way.
Conversely, as a result of this trend toward online commerce, brands are scaling back their brick-and-mortar presence, notably within the banking sector. This has alienated older customers, who are insecure in their technical abilities. In the UK, Barclays has formed its “Digital Eagles,” a technical team dedicated to help the elderly become familiar with online banking. While a benevolent gesture, it fails to recognise the unique needs of elderly people who use the bank as a touchpoint to connect with other people in a sociable, face-to-face way.
Brand managers must accept that their brand exists in an integrated ecosystem of touchpoints, where the customer chooses how and when they access it. Failing to provide a consistent brand experience will undermine what you stand for in the eyes of the customer. Inconsistency at a minimum implies that you haven’t got your act together, and at worst alienates a customer who can easily find an alternative through a simple Google search.
The optimal customer experience is user-friendly and streamlined, whether it takes place on a mobile device or in a store with several departments. The content is targeted, dynamic, appealing and easy to digest. Staff are always on hand, ready to catch the customer when he or she needs that bit of extra help. Customers appreciate this integrated experience because they can see that you relate to their needs and are more likely to adopt you as part of their preferred list of brands.
Brand managers must accept that their brand exists in an integrated ecosystem of touchpoints, where the customer chooses how and when they access it.
When your company’s purpose is crystal-clear, you can quickly detect if one of your customer touchpoints is inconsistent with who you are. Irrespective of which channels you use, there are some fundamental rules to creating an effective customer experience, all of which are common to the physical and digital world.
Six principles to build a better brand experience
1. Know yourself
In a landscape crowded with competing brands, yours must stand out to succeed. This might seem obvious, but there’s a proliferation of generic companies out there shouting for attention. To differentiate itself, an organisation or brand must deeply understand why it exists, what value it brings — where its purpose lies.
So how does this relate to customer experience? Purpose sharpens a brand’s focus and helps leaders make strategic decisions — a new product line, a new location, a new e-commerce strategy. Purpose defines the look, feel and tone of a brand’s communication with customers. It defines the attitude employees bring to customer interactions.
Take fashion brands for instance. Every store stocks a standard white shirt, but the product and surrounding store experience are different. A Ralph Lauren store offers preppy elegance, while an Alexander McQueen store provides subversive tailoring. Each designer creates their own white shirt, but their specific worldview influences its design, the choice of buttons, the surrounding store design, the advertising photography. By being true to themselves, fashion brands create unique customer experiences that help them to stand out and connect with their target audience.
2. Be consistent
Repetition is the way we learn, the way we become familiar with something. If the experience is positive, we seek it out again and tune into the things we recognise from before. Many brands use consistency to great effect. Go to any IKEA store around the world, and you will have exactly the same experience, even down to the little pencil you use to mark your order form for pickup. It reassures us that what we expect is what we’ll get with no unwelcome surprises.
There are exceptions to the rule. Australian beauty brand Aesop famously has completely different store designs in every branch around the world, but this is a carefully managed lifestyle brand, where new stimulus is a key element of their offering.
Consistency is also a key factor in processes, whether it’s finding a product on a website, finding your room in a hotel, or paying at a self-service kiosk. These are all processes that come with preconceived notions of how they should work. Through our day-to-day lives we learn these routines, depending on them to go about our business. Make the routine inconsistent with what customers have learned, and they will quickly become frustrated. A strong foundation of purpose makes it easier for companies to identify those factors that create a consistent impression and experience for consumers.
It’s important to remember that being consistent is not a contradiction to being able to evolve. There are many creative ways of transitioning without losing your brand’s consistency.
3. Make a strong first impression
The entry point to any experience creates a strong impression of what lies within. The first page of a website, the entrance to a store, the label on a product all trigger expectations of the subsequent experience. For example, if a customer lands on a website and the first page takes too long to load, and he or she closes all the pop-up ads only to find that the site didn’t have what it promised, it’s unlikely that the customer would engage with the brand again. Smart brands think hard about reducing the barriers to entry and the following steps to ensure a smooth customer experience.
Purpose helps brands create a desirable first impression, one that can be refined and deepened through customer engagement. Apple stores are a case in point. Their facades are consciously open, light and welcoming, free from noisy promotions or overly eager staff. Their interiors provide open sightlines, where choices are easily identifiable, with clear walkways to get there. Large product images often surround the stores, providing lures to draw customers in and acclimatise them to the environment. Apple’s website is the digital equivalent, following the same principles as the stores, helping visitors enter, learn and explore with similar techniques.
4. Be a guide
How you want people to experience your brand should color the way you lead them. Guiding the customer through your offering is the discipline of brand architecture. It defines the structure of a site, a product range or a building, helping consumers interact with the information within. It’s a far-reaching topic, too big to cover here, but one useful aspect of information architecture is called chunking.
Many businesses and brands make the mistake of being so proud of their products that they want to explain everything to everyone, confident that the world will surely fall in love with all they have to say. Sadly, this is never the case, as we humans only have the capacity to take in three to five items of information at a time. For example, most people can remember five words for 30 seconds, but would struggle to remember ten words for that duration. Our brains are simply not made to receive information without it being broken down into smaller manageable parts.
Chunking applies to the customer experience in many ways. An online fashion store has thousands of fast-selling products. To help the customer find what he or she is looking for, the retailer will chunk information into gender: male, female > item: tops, trousers, shoes, etc. > color: black, blue, grey > size: small, medium, large. This path helps shoppers navigate a complex offer quickly and easily. The same principle applies elsewhere, from the structure a book, to the organisation of a department store. Even this chapter is written with the principle of chunking. It’s a simple, effective and purposeful way to guide customers through a product range, to demonstrate the brand’s empathy for its audience, and to create a welcome customer experience.
5. Remember Hick’s Law
Hick’s Law declares that the time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of choices grows. This principle comes into play as more brands expand their range. Often, giving customers lots of choices is a good thing, but sometimes it can mean that the brand is spread too thin, messaging gets muddy or, even worse, the organisation’s purpose gets lost.
That being said, part of the appeal of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is the 40 flavours we can indulge in. Choice within services implies a deep range of competence and negates the need for the customer to go anywhere else. But within the context of customer experience, when choice meets a desire for speed, problems occur.
Companies often grow their range of products with line extensions, to provide a new talking point or accommodate a new demand. The risk is that over time, the range expands to a point where it can become overwhelming and frustrating for customers to search through. Similarly, some businesses grow through acquisition, offering an ever-expanding range of services, with no thought to how the value chain is communicated. Every brand is obliged to steward its range — balancing a broad offering with the discipline to edit down to just the right mix. Brands that make it easy for customers to find and select what they want, with minimum confusion, attract buyers and retain fans.
6. Practice forgiveness
We’re all human and therefore mistakes are inevitable. The principle of introducing forgiveness in a customer experience minimises the mistakes that customers might make in the buying process, thereby earning their trust and their willingness to proceed with the transaction.
Take booking a flight online, for example. It’s fraught with many decisions about destination, dates, pricing and insurance — before a traveler even begins the payment process.
Airlines employ the forgiveness principle by including:
- Reversible actions — if you click the wrong date, you have the option to retrace your steps by back-clicking.
- Summary — before you press the purchase button, you’re provided with a summary of what you think you’re buying to review.
- Prompts — if you don’t fill in the correct passport details, you are prompted to provide the required information.
- Confirmation — when you’ve made a purchase, a pop-up window, followed by an email, arrives to reassure that the transaction is complete.
- Safety nets — if you book the wrong date by mistake, you’re allowed 24 hours to change your ticket.
Forgiveness is regularly found in the real world, from no-entry signs to product instructions, and is crucial to providing a positive customer experience.
A strong brand experience has huge benefits:
- It brings in revenue to fund your original business idea.
- It upholds your hard-earned reputation.
- It transforms your purpose from theory into practice.
- It works as a magnet for your audience and thereby maintains the revenue stream by keeping customers happy.
This article was written by Gary Swindell, and was first published on Mission’s website. Find out what other fascinating issues we write about.
