Organizations touch their audiences in many ways, with multiple interactions across multiple brand touchpoints. These touchpoints are all of the interactive, static and human interactions that your company’s customers experience over the life of their relationship with your company. In short, the heart of customer experience lies in the ways they experience your brand.

Here’s the thing that many organizations seem to have trouble grasping: every interaction between you and your customers (or those you’d like to be customers) is part of the brand experience. Every single one, every single time.

This means that your brand attributes are communicated clearly – both positively and negatively, whether you like it or not – every time you “touch” your customer. These interactions include obvious touchpoints like advertising, your website, call center and sales team. Then there are those touchpoints that aren’t usually at the forefront of brand experience planning, such as Google SERP’s, billing statements, online customer forums and more. At the end of the day, virtually every point of contact between you and your customers impacts the customer experience. The lesson to be learned? Everything matters.

So when it comes to planning customer experience, keep their point-of-view in mind. Look at the customer relationship through the lens of his or her “journey” as individual interactions string together to create experiences, driving brand perceptions and attitudes. You’ll be amazed by what shows up when you start mapping customer experience. It often isn’t pretty, but it sure can be illuminating.

It’s pretty straightforward, in theory. Know what customers want and need at each stage of their relationship, and give it to them. Be consistent in what you say, how you say it, how it looks, and how what you say and do supports your brand promises. And always keep your customers in mind.

Simple, right? Surprisingly, it often can be. If you take the step of auditing a typical customer journey, you’ll likely be ahead of 90% of the competition. We see it every day – simple steps often lead to big returns. After all, knowing what the issues are is the first step to fixing them.

The more similar competing organizations are, the more important any difference becomes. And when meaningful differences are difficult (or impossible) to find in a product or service, the market will find differences outside of them.

Your customers will define you, if you don’t define yourself.
That’s why, for most organizations, the key to success is differentiation. Even if nearly identical in many ways to other competitive offerings, your prospects and customers do perceive differences. And these differences influence purchase decisions, and relationships.

But how do you define these differences? You start by gathering information, understanding the brand experience as well as strengths and weaknesses as perceived by your key audiences. Internally, this includes executives, management and customer-facing employees. Externally, garner insights from your customers, investors, prospective customers and others.

Taken together, this provides the data you need to create a perceptual map of your brand.  This “brand map” will help you understand where you stand with your customers, and the market overall, today.

Where do you want to go… tomorrow?
Brand research, and analysis of the data that must both drive and validate your approach, doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s relatively easy to capture both “present state” and “aspirational” brand attributes, values, and differentiators if you are smart, are a research expert (or have a team at your disposal) and understand both your business, and the underpinnings of high-performing brands.

But what isn’t easy is to create true differentiation by relying totally on what exists today. Yes, building a brand based on “present state” values and attributes takes both strategic acumen and research skill. But defining a brand that truly says “We’re Different; We’re Better; We’re Special” takes something more. Simply interpreting the numbers won’t drive the type of category-defining brand that many high-performing organizations wish to become. Supported by defensible (and illuminating) market and brand research, it also takes creativity.

Mind you, we’re not talking about “blue-sky let’s see what sticks” creativity, but creativity rooted in a deep understanding of your vision, your culture and your customer experience. To build a truly differentiated brand, you need to define where you want to go, where the “ideal” customer experience intersects with business, strategic and market realities, and set a stake – a defensible, differentiated stake – in the ground.

As Harry Beckwith points out in the book Selling the Invisible, “Create the possible service; don’t just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love.”

In most companies, market research is both confusing and misunderstood. Add the desire (and need) to better understand brand into the mix, and you have a recipe for even further confusion. After all, just because you measure something doesn’t mean you understand it.

Our experience shows that the utilization of research to drive brand insight requires multiple approaches to effectively measure brand experience, and understand ways to improve it.

The brand research toolbox includes various sampling methodologies.

Some of the most popular include one-on-one interviews, web and phone based surveys and focus groups. Deciding what approach to use comes down to the one question that simply isn’t asked (or more accurately, answered) often enough: what (exactly) are we trying to accomplish?

At the core of MCorp’s Brand Mapping approach, we leverage brand research to balance insights, strategy and defensibility with our ultimate goal: a deep understanding of the brand, a defined path to improving it, and defensible metrics that tell you with a degree of certainty where you are and where you need to go. So when it comes to understanding your brand, where – if anywhere – do focus groups fit?

Bottom line, we don’t think that focus groups are an effective technique for this type of brand research. Why? Several reasons:

1. Even with a skilled moderator, focus groups tend to be influenced by the few dominant people in the group, driving potentially biased output.
2. Marketers find that focus groups tend to deliver a single perspective; individual opinions are hard to capture because of group dynamics.
3. As a series of opinion from groups of 9-12 people, the results simply aren’t projectable over a broader audience. Whether or not the opinions expressed are valid is one thing; but attempting to project these opinions over broader audiences simply isn’t possible.

In short, it’s really hard to quantify or validate results, the sample size is small, and you simply cannot generalize findings to the target population. In fact, we’ve been called in several times by organizations who have attempted to research their brand with focus groups to get to defensible conclusions, and failed.

And as a vehicle to quantitatively assess elements of a brand platform, focus groups are useless.

In our experience, focus groups tend to capture perceptions of a moment in time, not how customers really organize their lives and their emotions. And because group dynamics play such a large part in the findings, they aren’t effective for drawing conclusions about a given population, though they are often used for such purposes.

We’ve found that the most effective method of gathering qualitative data around current brand perceptions are one-on-one interviews: with employees, customers and prospects, as well as the broader market. In our experience, the “one-on-one” interview process yields insights and frank, honest opinions much more effectively than traditional focus group formats, while costing substantially less.

From this come competitive insights, indicators of brand loyalty and experience, and insights into what drives brand attitudes and perceptions. Once organized, the brand and its position in the market can be validated with projectable follow-on customer experience and brand research.

So Where Do Focus Groups Fit?

The whole idea of focus groups is get people to project their opinions and attitudes in an interactive group setting, where participants are free to talk with other members of the group. As a result, they’re more of an open-ended elicitation than some of the other methods in the brand research toolkit. In our experience, they can work well for brainstorming new brand ideas, perceptual mapping or gathering creative and concept feedback.

To be honest, all marketing research is subject to Nobel prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg’s famous observation: “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” But  if you’re trying to brainstorm a new brand, creative concepts or brand extensions, focus groups are a great place to start (or finish). But if you’re trying to quantify your current brand, validate your position vs. your competition, understand attributes and values for internal audiences and external customer segments, then stick with methodologies which you can validate and defend.

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” – Verbal, The Usual Suspects

In public relations, there is a little-known segment of experts whose jobs are essentially to keep their clients names (and deeds) out of the light of public scrutiny. These men and women are almost never quoted or noted, yet they are powerful enough to pull feats worthy of David Blain by causing major negative events to literally disappear in plain sight.

Every so often in the branding world, a similar feat occurs. What do you do when your brand strategy is to be invisible, or you need to remove traces or connections of a brand to negative events? Changing your name is one way to do it; simply turn to your brand strategist of choice for guidance. But it only works if you keep your mouth shut.

Take for instance Altria Group, formerly known as Philip Morris.

This company’s innocuous logo and unassuming name tells you nothing about who they are or what they do. There’s a reason for this: the once-respected Philip Morris brand (the biggest member of the Big Tobacco club) needed to duck under cover from a constant barrage of media scrutiny and legal attacks. Unlike their competitor Lorillard Corp. which has always tried to keep a low profile, Philip Morris spent years building its brand around cigarettes and beer (“the companies of your pleasures”).

Reinventing its brand as a brand representing “nothing” was a Seinfeld-esque stroke of genius. As Altria, the company is now able to fully express its altruistic side, because non-profit organizations that had previously distanced themselves from Philip Morris were (and are) only too happy to accept grants from Altria. And best of all, the Philip Morris name wasn’t gone entirely; it could be trotted out to take the blame for corporate sins and then retired to the closet.

An unfortunate (though extremely impressive) example of marketing smarts trumping morals, as the biggest name in tobacco literally disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Corporate Culture Rules: Why Xe will likely forever remain “the company formerly known as Blackwater.”

Then you have Xe. Founded as Blackwater Group, Xe is a multi-billion dollar corporation built by CEO Eric Prince into one of the largest military contractors in the world over 6 short but tumultuous years. But the last few years have been hard on their image. As five former Blackwater employees prepared to defend themselves on charges of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, civil suits and negative press abounded. What to do? Change your name. Company spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said Blackwater was changing its name because “the idea is to define the company as what it is today and not what it used to be.”

Better tell that to the CEO. Not the kind of man to hide quietly and wait anything out, former navy SEAL and billionaire auto parts heir Eric Prince took up several pages in this month’s Vanity Fair pointing out how unfairly he and his firm have been treated. That’s all well and good – but if the point of your name change is to lower your profile, well, you need to lower your profile.

Lesson learned?

Two of the three “legs” of the brand experience triangle are related to the corporation. The vision comes from the top, and ideally closely aligns with employees to drive a consistent corporate culture. We suspect that Xe has these two nailed down nice and tight. But the other leg – customer experience – is the one that drives how the world sees you. In Xe’s case, their direct customers – primarily the U.S. Government – still seem to be happy with what they’re getting. But their indirect customers – the taxpayers who ultimately pay Xe’s bills – are getting another perception entirely.

Brands succeed most powerfully when they align with the passion of their people, and tap into the passion of their customers. Just look at Apple or Pixar. But sometimes, it’s best to keep your passion, and your point of view, under wraps.

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.

Your brand is an experience, ideally resulting from a successfully planned and delivered combination of messages and interactions across multiple Touchpoints.

To keep these experiences (and brand perceptions) positive and appropriate, companies must consistently touch customers and prospects in ways that build satisfaction, trust and loyalty, at each stage of their Customer Relationship Lifecycle. This systematic process creates expectations that must be regularly met, resulting in customer confidence and an emotional connection–the foundation for all successful brands.

The downside, of course, is when good Touchpoints go bad. How many customers can you lose due to dissatisfaction to a call center employee with an attitude, or an accent they cannot understand?

You get it. It’s pretty simple, really: Managing the brand experience across all Touchpoints matters.

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.

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!)