As the importance and power of brands – and the customer experiences they drive – continues to creep up the scale of corporate awareness and priority, brand consultants are scrambling to find ever more evocative (scratch that: make it “provocative”) ways to describe the relationships that the buyers of products and services have with brands.

I grant you, we brand strategist and consulting types are doing a great job confusing corporate marketers. Now they can’t focus on driving sales through the door until they figure out how to make a “Lovemark.” Customer intimacy is more important than customer relationships, and those are pretty important too. Now there’s the “Love Triangle Model.” Throw emotional contagion into the mix, and we’re going to have brand-based STD’s next… (are phishing and pharming the equivalent?)

Maybe it’s a little too much to ask, but do I really want “love” from (or with) a brand? Maybe I’m just a little uncomfortable with these new levels of brand intimacy. Call me old fashioned, but these are all just new ways to describe the same old thing: Create a product or deliver a service that solves a real need. Support it with honesty, integrity and quality, and make sure you respond quickly to customer needs, delivering a consistent, differentiated brand experience across all your customer touchpoints.

Make sure your market knows that you do this, and encourage them to tell others. Conduct loyalty and brand research to make sure you know what your customers think and how they feel about you vs. your competition, and act on the results.

No offense, but can’t we save these “sweet nothings” for our wives, husbands and significant others? After all, if you want this kind of involvement, where would you rather turn for fulfillment? I know where I’d rather go. I’ll give you hint: it’s not Amazon. And if this trend towards unwanted intimacy keeps up, we can always create new meaning for “brand therapy.” We’ll need it.

Brand Promise. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But what does it really mean to make and support these statements, and what is the cost of less-than-perfect delivery? In truth, achieving the outcomes that delivering on this can accomplish requires near-flawless execution in making, delivering, keeping, and reinforcing the brand promise.

While appropriately positioning the organization and the development of a branding and messaging platform are critical first steps, there must also be steadfast, across-the-board organizational commitment to developing and implementing the structure, systems, and staffing needed to effectively deliver on the promise.

Our experience shows us that the benefits of making and keeping a brand promise are well worth it. Here’s a quick primer on our point-of-view:

Defining (and Making) the Promise. Your promise needs to be relevant, compelling, believable and achievable – and supported by the values that drive your organization – to make a deep connection with your target audiences. To define it, you must understand your organization, your customers and your competition.

Delivering the Promise. The responsibility for delivering the promise message falls primarily on the sales and marketing team, while management and employees in the field deliver on the elements of the promise on a daily basis.

Keeping the Promise. Your success hinges on the competency and commitment of line staff, IT, call center, outsourced vendors, etc. to deliver on the promise at each Touchpoint. So much of your relationship with customers, and of your ability to keep your promises to them, will depend on the precise coordination and structure of your systems and staff. Leverage the processes, procedures and systems needed to effectively communicate with each other, and your customers will experience the positive results.

Feedback: Have we kept our promise? The only way to know that you are making, delivering, and keeping the right promises is to continually get feedback from your customers. Utilizing Customer Listening Tools – including those in MCorp’s Customer Experience Mapping toolkit – can be qualitative, or it can be a formal, quantitative process for measuring gaps between customer satisfaction, attitudes, and needs. Finally, processes must be in place for easily and systematically collecting, reviewing, and acting upon this feedback.

Those organizations that successfully connect with customers and deliver on a relevant promise reap huge, quantifiable benefits in areas such as retention, loyalty, customer NPV (“Net Present Value”) and LCV (“Lifetime Customer Value”). The flip side for those organizations which promise one thing and deliver an experience that just doesn’t match up is the cynicism, increased churn, and reduced loyalty and satisfaction which can negatively affect relationships with both internal (employees) and external (customers, analysts, partners, etc.) audiences.

Regardless of industry, shareholders (and those that influence them, such as media and analysts) are a core audience. So what are the best ways to “touch” these key stakeholders, and build a loyal shareholder following?

In the age of “what have you done for me lately?” investors are increasingly fickle. The ability to retain investors for the long term drives valuation. To help those willing, we’ve identified key Investor & Media Relations concepts that every management team (of publicly traded companies or companies that wish to become public) should understand, and address.

Create (and articulate) a strategic plan.
Long term thinking in a short term world. It is not impossible, but must be strategically coordinated across your organization, and articulated in a way that investors understand, believe and support. Investors must understand the direction your company is headed and develop reasonable expectations for determining success. If investors’ goals are met, they will provide you with the capital “runway” to execute your vision.

Invest in online.
Unsurprisingly, companies, investors and other stakeholders are now shifting their focus to the internet. Investors need (and want) to be steered to the web whenever there are significant corporate events. Annual reports, recorded earnings calls, conference presentations and other investor updates should be available through the website. By keeping investors on your site, you control the interaction and can help shape investors’ perceptions.

The annual report is still your most important investor touchpoint.
Despite the preponderance of other material available to investors, the annual is still king. Take the time and effort to ensure a satisfactory product that delivers the proper message to investors. Of primary importance: lay the foundation for investor expectations in the CEO’s letter. This is the bar against which investors measure fundamental execution.

Analyst coverage helps drive loyalty.
Getting analyst coverage will benefit corporations in both investor interest and market valuation. Investors need assistance with due diligence, and analysts provide this service.

Press coverage is essential to building (and maintaining) a broad investor base.
There is no better way to inform investors of your story than through unbiased local trades and national media. Seize every opportunity to present your firm to the outside world, and leverage your coverage online.

There is no such thing as too much investor communication.
Your strategic plan must be delivered to investors. Never catch investors by surprise. Pre-announce earnings dates, conference calls and speaking engagements. Let investors know what to expect, and when to expect it.

Focus on running your business.
Whether it is accomplished internally or outsourced professionally, Investor Relations is a full time job. Do not expect your CEO, CFO, or other professional to be able to competently handle both their job and IR duties. Investors expect, and deserve, the attention that an “ownership” stake implies. Of course, not all investors are created equal, any more than your customers are.

Investors may be your most important customers.
Without an equity valuation, your business would disappear. Deal with investors honestly and professionally. Never ignore investor questions, but respond immediately. Creating loyalty is an important step towards achieving success as a public company.

We made our case for benchmarking and covered the different things that your organization can benchmark against in part 1 of this series. Now, we’ll start looking at what your company should benchmark against.

What to measure?  Why understanding the relationships between various performance measures is a primary objective of benchmarking.

Simplistically, understanding the relationships between various performance measures means measuring the right things and making certain that a focus on those things measured does not negatively impact performance against other important metrics.

Regardless of industry or area of focus (the areas we have the greatest experience in include branding, customer experience and marketing performance), it’s critical to be clear on what you’re trying to accomplish, and why. You don’t need to (nor should you) measure everything. Just the right things.

To benchmark performance against competitive industry leaders dictates a certain approach. If you wish to benchmark functional performance against non-competitive functional leaders (e.g. mortgage broker experience and satisfaction at a financial services institution vs. meeting planner experience and satisfaction with Ritz-Carlton) it dictates another.

If you are interested in measuring your performance (e.g. importance vs. importance on key experience or perceptual attributes) you’ll need to understand which segments to measure against. For instance: is the benchmarked opinion of an entire industry (e.g. 50,000 plus brokers) the measure you should be tracking and improving? Or is it the opinion of the top 20% of the segment that are the most profitable? How do your customers deviate from the industry overall?

If you improve performance against key metrics industry-wide (let’s say – just for example – speed to negotiated quote and commitment letter for commercial mortgage brokers), will that make you more profitable? Or, should you focus on improving the experience on the metrics that matter to the segment that represents your most profitable customers?

In our opinion, benchmarking is relevant only in so far as the metrics you benchmark are linked to key financial, business and customer objectives, and the metrics that define success for your business in these areas.

Although linking various metrics can be difficult to do, it is critically important for several reasons. If the cause-and-effect relationships are identified and understood, then these measures begin to provide the ability to serve as predictors of future organizational and financial performance.

Understanding the cause-and-effect relationship is relatively easy. Identifying leading and lagging indicators is typically more difficult, though critical.

Why benchmark? And what should you benchmark against?

We were asked an interesting question during a new business pitch the other day. In the middle of our discussion of the “Touchpoint Performance Dashboard” and our ability to help clients both understand key metrics and develop benchmarks for ongoing performance measurement, a senior marketing exec piped in: “What is benchmarking?”

After a (very brief) pause to see if they were serious, I quickly dove in. But the question was illuminating. How many marketers – in this age of management focus on ROI and performance measurement – wonder what to track to prove how well they’re doing?

Our definition of benchmarking is the act of comparing a specific measurement (or set of measurements) to a benchmark. External benchmarking compares internal measurements to measurements from external sources (prospects, competitors, non-competitive functional leaders). Internal benchmarking compares internal measurements (typically by division, process, unit, customer or segment) against other internal measures.

A recent engagement on the process of identifying, codifying and transferring internal best practices fell into the internal benchmarking category. The question we answered was, “How can we (organizationally) find out what we (individually or at the business unit level) already know?”

Once they got it, this client was really interested in external benchmarking, followed by a dialogue around what they’re trying to accomplish: Would you like to benchmark yourselves against best practices in your industry? Or would you like to benchmark yourselves against perceptions of the ideal? Or do you want to benchmark performance against the ideal as perceived by the most profitable, loyal customers you have, and others like them?

The answers, unsurprisingly, were yes, yes, yes and yes.

But we’ve been able to narrow this down somewhat to those metrics that really matter, with the objectives of helping our clients adopt best practices and increasing performance. But benchmarking should be treated as a continuous process in which organizations continually seek to challenge their practices and improve upon them. While many organizations benchmark on weekly or monthly performance data, we’ve found that quarterly measures are most manageable, while still occurring often enough to incent positive change.

The approach you’ll take is driven by exactly what you’re trying to accomplish, and what you plan to with the data once it’s been gathered and analyzed.

There are many things that you could choose to benchmark against. But do you need to benchmark against all of them? Probably not. Read part 2 of this series, for our perspective on what you should measure (vs. what you can), and why understanding the relationships between various performance measures is a primary objective of benchmarking.

Creating brand value is not a static process. A continual cycle of monitoring and assessment is key to maintaining relevance – and increasing value.

Building and maintaining a strong brand is not a simple task. In some companies, the hardest step is gaining a top-down organizational commitment. For those that do, the rewards are great. The following five steps can serve as an initial guide.

Step 1: Assessment

Understand your brand. What are the internal and external perceptions? How do your key audiences see you versus your competition? Are they aware? Engaged? Where are the gaps in your brands performance?  Brand research is the only way to effectively assess where you stand, and why.

Step 2: Strategy

Prioritize communication of rational and emotional perceptions that communicate key customer benefits, as well as the drivers of brand loyalty, repurchase and engagement.  Through a quantifiable understanding of what drives value for your brand, brand strategy will reinforce desired perceptions and behaviors.

Step 3: Architecture

Architect a strategic brand hierarchy that effectively communicates brand and messaging priorities through product and service lines, divisional and/or subsidiary relationships, geographies, segments and distribution channels.

Step 4: Application

Be relentlessly consistent with the delivery and control of your brand experience across all channels. Ensure that your brand is consistently – and effectively – delivered across all major categories of customer touchpoints, including static (such as print ads or direct mail), interactive (including web and online) and human (sales team, call centers, etc.).

Step 5: Monitoring

Brands must be maintained and monitored to ensure that they retain relevance and importance with key audiences. Assign explicit responsibility for custodianship and conduct periodic brand audits and tracking studies – leveraging your own methodologies, or a proven tool such as Brand Mapping – to provide ongoing market-driven feedback.

What is “strategic planning” – and how does it work?

While the phrases is used often (and often misused) Strategic Planning is critical to the success of any exercise. Bringing multiple perspectives into focus with an eye on defined objectives, it is the process an organization goes through to envision and achieve its future—identifying the steps and means necessary to leverage existing strengths and overcome identified weaknesses.

The benefits from a business point-of-view are clear. What are our revenue, growth and sales targets? What competitive and market forces can affect our future, for better or worse? What should (and what must) we do to achieve these goals?

While the level of involvement in creating the plan may vary depending on your product or service, timing and market situation, we believe that at a minimum you should ask for input from current customers, prospects and your in-house sales and marketing teams. Representatives from anticipated support functions (customer service, installation, and maintenance) should also be an integral part of the planning process.

The value of strategic planning for brand, marketing and customer experience.

Since both the value and revenue for virtually all organizations is driven by its customers, planning is critical when thinking about ways to connect with them. When it comes to meeting these business goals, your ability effectively market, relevantly brand and deliver customer experiences that drive customers closer are a few of core competencies required for business success.

Whether your objectives are to inform, persuade, sell, or reassure, you need a clear understanding of where you are, where you want to go, and what you need to do to get there. In this context, Strategic Planning serves as your road map, guiding and connecting every aspect of interacting with key audiences from awareness of your company, product or service to the creation and nurturing of loyal customer advocates.

It provides a framework for examining your customers, prospects and competition. It helps to drive innovation in products and services, and service levels, that allow you to pinpoint your brand, improve experiences, and focus marketing and related investments on the right customers, with the right offerings and the right messages.

Within the context of brand, marketing and customer experience, the strategic planning process can drive myriad positive end results. Among other benefits, the research-based definition and articulation of strategies and tactics will help your organization to:

• Determine and respond to shifts in customer wants and needs;
• Understand levels of current market awareness and position;
• Uncover competitive strategies and market trends, and evaluate the opportunities and threats they create;
• Refine relevant metrics to track ROI on your investments in all related areas, and improve that return over time;
• Understand target market perceptions of your strengths and weaknesses, and determine which to reinforce or address;
• Evaluate new product/service opportunities and the potential impact of external threats;
• Improve communications with your audiences, both internally and externally;
• Establish ongoing internal, market and competitive information-gathering procedures;
• Identify ways to accelerate and manage growth;
• And many others…

Establishing specific, measurable objectives and timelines against your plan also allows you to continually track—and adjust if necessary—your strategies, tactics, and investments. This creates appropriate expectations, accountability, and an effective means of measuring progress towards your goals.

How well is your organization doing at understanding – and improving – customer experience?

Where does your organization fit? Maybe you have it nailed. A leader, you know who your customers are and what they want – and they love you for giving it to them.

An inspiration, you set the standards in your industry for customer experience management. Your customers experience excellence at just about every touchpoint they encounter, and outstanding talent is clamoring to work for you.  You excel in comparison to your competitors, increasing sales and boosting retention for your best customers and employees.

Maybe you’re a “fast follower”, and your organization is benefiting from being slightly ahead of the curve. While you may be doing well, you’re finding it difficult to compete with the customer service leaders in your industry.

Maybe you’re a laggard –  you wish you could establish yourselves as customer service leaders… but are having troubles getting your hands around what this means (much less how to accomplish this). All the places where it interacts with customers? (“Touchpoints”)

Wherever you are on this continuum, there are some basic questions you can ask to help figure out where you stand.  Without getting too complex, answer these questions honestly on the 5 point scale (see below) and see how you’re doing.

Recognize that if your average score is 4 or better, you’re doing great by any measure. And if you’re not doing so well, know that if you focus on improving your performance on these questions, you’ll be a leader in no time.

The 6-Question Customer Experience Audit

How well is your organization doing at understanding…

1. Which customers are your most valuable, and why?
2. Which interactions (or “touchpoints”) these key customers most value, and why?
3. Your key customers’ needs, in each lifecycle stage with your organization?
4. The most common sequence of “pre-purchase” touchpoints, as prospects (or repeat purchasers) progress from awareness of your offerings to selection?
5. The influence of “post-purchase” touchpoints on satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy?
6. Whether your key customers are dissatisfied, satisfied, or loyal? And who your advocates are?

You can answer the 6-Question Customer Experience Audit using this scale

5 = Extremely Well (We have it nailed.)

4 = Moderately Well

3 = Just OK

2 = Not that well

1 = Not well at all (We have no idea!)