Posts Tagged customer loyalty
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!
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.
Poor Touchpoint Management Results In Poor Business
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Touchpoints on October 18, 2010
Witnessed this weekend inside a gift shop around the corner from where I live:
Two women were browsing together in the store when one found a stack of decorative napkins. She picked up a napkin and, noting the price as $4.99, grabbed three more and headed to the cashier to check out.
The cashier, who happened to be the owner of the shop, apologized and said the price was actually $9.99 each, as indicated on one of the other napkins the woman held. Apparently one of the sales staff had placed an incorrect price sticker on the napkin. While the two women stood there, the owner called the staffer responsible over to tell her about the error, and then politely turned her attention back to the woman to ask if she still wanted the higher priced napkins.
The woman declined, and she and her friend left the store empty handed.
Think they’ll ever be back? Me, either.
Not only did the owner lose the immediate sale (even at a reduced profit by honoring the $4.99 price — for all four of the napkins), but it’s highly unlikely either of the two women will ever be back. Plus, I wonder how many of their friends they’ll share the story with?
No doubt, this shop owner has invested a considerable amount of time and money to ensure the store is properly stocked, staffed, and promoted. Too bad she has yet to realize that poor delivery of even the smallest touchpoint can have dire consequences.
What You Could Learn From Costco
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Identity on August 10, 2010
I like going to Costco. Free food samples, good prices on good products, a frequently changing selection, interesting people-watching, and the occasional I’ve-got-to-get-this-today-because-I-know-it-won’t-be-here-tomorrow deal. I’ve bought eyeglasses at Costco. Discounted movie tickets and spa packages. And wine and fresh flowers, too.
It’s big. It’s not too crowded (except on weekends). And there’s something very “I’ve just robbed the bank”-ish about walking out with a 52 pound bag of dog food and having paid what a 25 pound bag would cost at a regular grocery store.
There are at least a dozen other reasons to like Costco. And, for me, it all fits into a singular image of this: selection (not the widest but enough for me most of the time) and value in a no-frills-but-enjoyable shopping experience.
I suspect most loyal Costo customers have the same image. And I suspect the good folks at Costco planned for this image to take root by very deliberately mapping out their brand identity platform, and then executing it to near perfection through their various brand touchpoints.
By developing their brand identity, Costco management also clearly defined several things they are not. Service is not their strong point. Neither is product selection. Elegant ambience is another thing Costo leaves to other retailers. A limited number of locations is ok by them. Product displays are a secondary consideration to functional stocking logistics. All these possible negatives, and more, are just fine with Costco. Because none of them are a part of the brand identity they developed.
Though Costco is unabashedly not all things to all people, they somehow manage to accomodate a very large number of disparate customer groups.
Simply, Costco operates in a manner which is completely synchronized with their strategically-developed brand identity. Their customers come to Costco for the right reasons — the reasons Costco itself has identified and communicated via their brand touch points – and rarely leave disillusioned. And business is good at Costco.
Yes, your business is completely different from Costco’s. But you can take away at least this from the Costco model: it’s ok to remain true to your brand identity and eschew the notion of being all things to all people. It’s not a bad way to run a successful business, as the folks at Costco know.
Madmen & Loyal Brand Customers
Posted by Mike Paffenback in Brand Touchpoints on July 30, 2010
photo copyright AMC
I like the AMC cable tv series, Madmen. It’s set in the early 1960′s New York advertising agency world and seems to deliver an accurate peek into how that business operated back then (well before my time) while weaving in the requisite tv drama of relationship issues, marital affairs, etc.
There’s a natural interest because of the advertising business context, my livelihood for the past 30 years. But there’s something more. There’s a certain visual style, a consistent smartness to the writing, a tight definition of the character roles, a freshness to the plot turns, and a real involvement with the unfolding storyline and the characters. Every time I watch, I have an expectation that my one-hour investment won’t be wasted.
Madmen appeals to me for various reasons, and it continues to reinforce those reasons every time I tune in. From day one, I’ve been a loyal customer of the show. And, until the producers mess up and give me a reason to stray elsewhere, I’ll continue to tune in to AMC every Sunday night at 10pm.
Apparently I’m not alone. The show does well in the ratings and has garnered critical acclaim since it began its run in the summer of 2007. And for uber-fanatics, there are various ways to become even more deeply engaged with the show and it’s characters online and through social media.
Successful tv shows like Madmen are actually no different than successful brands.
Just as for well-liked tv shows, well-liked brands cultivate customer loyalty by consistently reinforcing the reasons those customers became customers to begin with. They do this by carefully identifying, prioritizing, and then deliberately managing the customer interactions with the brand — the brand touchpoints — that drive the sale, reinforce brand loyalty, and foster a genuine long-term engagement.
Customers form a positive image about the brands they repeatedly use, just like they do for the tv shows they routinely watch. Maybe it’s worth thinking about your brands as if they were tv shows:
- Are people tuning in?
- Tuning out?
- Are they regular viewers?
- Hit and miss?
- Loyal fanatics?
- Why?
Getting a handle on this now so you can better manage your brand touchpoints that matter will pay off with brand loyalty later.