Archive for category Brand Touchpoints
How to Identify Your Brand Touchpoints
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Touchpoints on October 11, 2011
Your brand — no matter what it is and to whom you sell — has many layers of subtle and not-so-subtle interactions with your customers, prospects and influencers. Identifying each and every one of those brand touchpoints is the first step in making your customers fanatics, your prospects lifelong customers, and your influencers brand ambassadores. It’s a worthy investment of time and resources.
Where to start? Much of this process is good common sense.
First, recognize that you likely have three different kinds of brand audiences, and your interactions with each may vary:
- Prospects
- Customers
- Influencers: a more encompassing group of people who can somehow weigh in on the relative benefits, value, features, purchase-worthiness of your brand. They include everyone from internal employees to outside sales reps, retailers, the press, existing or previous customers, bloggers and reviewers, and many others.
Secondly, recognize there are at least three stages to someone ultimately buying and using your brand, and each one contains different levels of brand interaction:
- Pre-Purchase stage where prospects seek any and all evaluative information available. Consider all interactions that build awareness, convey differentiation, create a brand connection, and drive purchase consideration. Brand audiences here are prospects, inflluencers, and even existing customers (repeat sales/upselling).
- Purchase stage where prospects become customers and seek validation. Consider all transactional and communications interactions from order placement through delivery and set up. Brand audiences here are prospects.
- Post-Purchase stage where customers use the brand and seek validation for a potential repeat engagement. Consider all follow-up activities and programs here, including loyalty programs, warranty performance, product quality, etc. Brand audiences here are customers and influencers.
Finally, recognize that brand interactions are likely company-wide, so consider the various operating departments and functions within your company and the types of brand interactions conducted within each. Finance (billing, credit terms, etc.), customer service (warranty service, touble shooting, etc.), R&D (product trials, market input, etc.), and most likely many others — you get the drift.
Now, (take a deep breath here), map out your complete brand marketing process – from initial product development through post-sale follow up. Think through every single known actual and potential point of contact while keeping the different brand audiences and the different purchase stages in mind relative to the different operating finctions of the company. Identify everything, from emails to phone calls to website, to packaging, to user documentation, advertising, etc. Solicit the assistance of the various departments within the company.
With the internal audit completed, it’s now time to conduct external research to probe customers, prospects and influencers about the buying/using/re-purchasing processes with which they engage the brand on their own terms. The goal here is to completely define the myriad of interactions that make up the brand relationship and their relative role in creating customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
With the internal and external audits complete, you now should have a pretty clear picture of the various brand touchpoints. Next, we’ll kick around ways to prioritize each relative to the role they play in moving prospects to customers, and customers to lifelong fanatics. Yipee!
What’s Your “Brand Experience” Like?
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Touchpoints on September 29, 2011
When it comes to buying and using a product or service, we’ve all had really good and really bad experiences. Chances are we’ll go back wherever the experience has been good and never darken the halls again where it’s been bad.
My wife and I recently went through the process of buying a new car, something I’d typically place on the list just below getting my eye poked with a sharp stick in terms of fun things to do. After much research and hand wrangling, we settled on a Hyundai. I can’t speak for all Hyundai dealerships, but ours represented the Hyundai brand extremely well and made the overall experience — dare I say — “enjoyable.” The net: I have no problem going back to the Hyundai brand (assuming the car performs as expected) — and that particular dealership — in the future. There wasn’t any one thing that made this brand engagement work well, but rather a bunch of small things conspiring together to provide an excellent brand experience. Small things like the way the salesperson interacted with us. His product knowledge. The comfort and confidence we felt as we set about negotiating price. The dealership facilities. The features and value of the car itself. The iciness of the cup of water I was provided. Etc.
A couple of weeks later we received a detailed survey about our experience, with questions probing all manner of our interaction with the dealership and the Hyundai product. Clearly, Hyundai’s mission is to continue to improve the complete brand experience by defining and correcting the specific areas where they under-perform relative to their brand touchpoint management plan. As a challenger brand (but for not much longer, I suspect), Hyundai needs to continue to leverage strengths and shore up weaknesses — just like any successful brand.
Which brings me to you and the brand experience with which you are providing your customers and prospects. Do you know precisely what it is? Are you systematically assessing the experience your customers and prospects have with your brand(s)? Do you have a touchpoint management plan which prescribes, specifically and in measureable terms, how your touchpoints — interactions — are to be delivered relative to your brand identity? Do you know which touchpoints carry the greatest weight in keeping a customer or moving a prospect to become one?
The connection between delivering an exceptional brand experience and growing your business is obvious, no matter what business you’re in. So, specifically what are you doing about it?
Employee Training for Brand Touchpoint Delivery
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Identity, Brand Touchpoints on April 15, 2011
Last week my wife and I traveled to visit my daughter at college. Stopping at a Dairy Queen about half way for a mid-afternoon pick-me-up is part of the routine. One of DQ’s signatures is, of course, The Blizzard, and I’m a big fan. A Blizzard, for those unenlightened few, is simply a cup of soft vanilla ice cream hand-blended with your choice of ingredients like Oreo cookies, M&M candies, Reeses candies, etc.
No doubt, DQ has identified at least a few important brand touchpoints for employees to deliver during their preparation of this brand-defining, flagship product: complete blending of ingredients, clean presentation of the cool treat, and a warm smile. It’s likely there are others, but I imagine these are the very basics.
On this particular visit, our DQ server completely failed to deliver on those basics, which left me with a less-than-stellar impression about that DQ location specifically, but also a bit of tarnish on the DQ brand overall. The product was virtually un-blended and the rim, upper inside, and outside of the cup were splattered with ingredients. It was an unappealling mess.
Clearly, the employee had not been properly trained on the nuances of making and presenting a perfect rendition of The Blizzard. It made me wonder what else he hadn’t been trained to properly do. That’s a problem of local franchise management to be sure, but also for corporate management who is charged with defining and managing delivery of the DQ brand identity. I mentally compared this experience with the obvious care my local Starbucks barista takes in preparing a perfect cup of coffee and it occured to me who’s paying closer attention to important brand-defining touchpoints, and who’s likely more sucessful as a business.
Are your employees completely steeped in your brand identity and the brand touchpoints required to properly deliver that identity to your customers? Are you sure?
Managing Brand Touchpoints: What If You Only Had One Customer?
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Touchpoints on April 14, 2011
What if the entire success of your business depended on one customer, alone? What kind of heightened focus would you have on delivering the best all-around brand experience possible to ensure that customer remained your customer?
It’s hard to think this way when the reality is you likely have tens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of customers. But the same reality is that each of those customers is a single entity or individual, each one exposed to your brand — and those of your competitors — positively or negatively, based on how the brand’s touchpoints are delivered.
In a previous post, I referred to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s new book, Onward, which became available last week. In it, Schultz made one interesting observation about the problems plaguing Starbucks which lead to a brand revitalization focus in early 2008: company management was consumed with managing the big behemoth into which Starbucks had grown rather than focusing on the ”ones” (the individual neighborhood stores and customers) which drove its business. Starbucks had simply forgotten that the ones add up. To fix this, Shultz rededicated himself and the entire organization to refocus on the ones and improving the delivery of the smallest details of what makes Starbucks uniquely Starbucks.
So, what if one customer — one person, alone, was responsible for the success or failure of your business? How different would the brand experience be that you deliver? How much closer attention would you pay the the various brand touchpoints that make and keep that customer a customer and that make your brand distinctively what it is?
Something to ponder over your next cup of coffee.
Starbucks Gets the Value of Brand Touchpoints
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Identity, Brand Touchpoints on April 8, 2011
Starbucks knows a thing or hundred about clicking with its customers. Not only have they mastered the art of serving coffee to the masses, but they also pour a consistent brand experience with every single cup.
But it hasn’t been easy.
Starbucks celebrated its 40th anniversary on March 30, but as recent as 2008 (before the recession), reaching that milestone was very much in jeopardy.
Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO, has a new book just out, Onward: How Starbucks Fought For Its Life Without Losing Its Soul. I haven’t read it yet, but the title promises an inside look at the extraordinary emphasis Schultz placed on getting back to the soul of the Starbucks brand when he returned to lead the company in 2008, after turning over day-to-day operations control in 2000.
No doubt, the company continued to flourish through the first half of the 2000′s. By 2006, company stock touched $40 and locations swelled to more than 12,000 worldwide. But a funny thing happened on the way to this success: Starbucks apparently forgot their brand identity — the soul that made them distinctively, uniquely Starbucks among the increasing tide of competitors. Store traffic dropped. Spending per customer declined. Same store sales comps stumbled. And the stock price fell into the single digits. Staff was let go, and many stores were shuttered. As 2007 was winding down, things didn’t look so good for Starbucks.
The problems were many, including growing too fast, poor employee training, not monitoring costs, and operational shortcuts. The net effect was disenfranchised Starbucks loyalists. Lots of them.
(Re-)enter Howard Schultz. In early 2008, he told a gathering of employees at Starbucks headquarters, “We have to find and bring the soul of our company back, find our voice.” Yahtzee!
For years, Starbucks enjoyed a distinctive voice, and the rewards of speaking with it. They did the heavy lifting of crafting a strategic brand identity, and then implementing that identity throughout the hundreds of brand touchpoints that defined the Starbucks brand experience.
However, from 2000 until early 2008, they failed to live up to that brand identity and nearly paid for it.
So, what’s the lesson for us mere mortals in the business world? Do the work of crafting a distinctive brand identity, and then deliver that identity by actively managing the brand touchpoints that drive business. And stick to it.