Brand and Customer Experience

Branding is the commercial side of a company or product experience - what happens behind the scenes when creating that moment for customers with the end vision in mind. A successful branding strategy requires that both these aspects are integrated into one cohesive story to ensure quality and consistency in all aspects of your customer's journey with your company, product, or service.

Brand Experience is the actual customer's interaction with the brand and the way they feel, think, or talk about it.

So how can you be sure that your branding strategy is having the intended effect on the customers' experience with your brand?

A successful branding strategy should result in customers becoming emotionally connected with the brand, which will then affect their experience via customer empathy, product/service choice, etc. Brands that create emotional connections with customers do better than brands that do not. (Kotler & Armstrong, 2004)

To understand your customers properly means to know how they are feeling about the brand at any given time. This emotional connection is created through the customer's experience with the brand's differentiation, stories, and overarching image.

The good news is that you don't need to be a strategic branding expert to create this strong emotional connection with your customers. The following six branding processes can help you with this process. They are quick, easy, but more importantly, effective.

1) Understanding the customer's journey.

2) The ability to ask all the right questions.

3) Building awareness about the brand

4) Motivating your staff to react with empathy.

5) Finding the right balance of warmth and honesty.

6) Knowing how to adapt and innovate.

1) Storytelling - understanding the customer's journey.

View the customer's journey as a complex web of emotions, desires, needs, and aspirations. Understanding the customer's journey is all about discovering how to tell your brand in a way that resonates with them. You must know your customers well enough to discover what is unique about them. To create authenticity you have to understand their journey through the eyes of the customer. Without knowing your customers, you can't tell them your story.

Your brand's story needs to be authentic, interesting, and compelling, otherwise, customers will not connect with it. It starts with your name, logo, and other elements of the brand. Without this story, it is difficult to speak or write about your brand in a meaningful way. Then you need to find out a) What makes your brand unique? b) How does it stand out from its competitors? c) Why should customers choose your brand over the competition in the first place? d) What makes your brand so special when everyone else has so many others to choose from? e) how is your brand solving your customer's problems? f) Are there others who can benefit from the solutions you are providing?

This will help you build the right narrative and take it out there.

2) Customer empathy - asking all the right questions.

What is customer empathy? It is a verbal and non-verbal response to another person's feelings, needs, wants, and dreams. It means understanding what makes your customers tick - feeling their pain, delight, joy, and sorrow. It requires you to be curious about the person you're dealing with, to ask what they think, to wonder what motivates them, to want to understand their needs and requirement as a customer. Allow them to speak while you listen carefully as they answer those questions or as they share information that may help you understand them more fully on a personal level.

This is when your customer interacts with your brand for the very first time. It may even be before they've met you because there's so much information about you and your business online that affects how they feel about you and how likely it is that they will buy from you instead of someone else.

You can use empathy to understand and shape your customers' experience with your brand, even before they meet you.

3) Awareness – noticing, interpreting, and acting on feedback.

There is a curious thing clients do as they interact with brands: they check for clues about brand authenticity. They check its website / Social media pages etc. for information about the brand and seek out what makes them different from the competition - notice what they offer, how it compares to other brands, and whether it aligns with their expectations to be worth investing their time in talking to them.

You need to ask your customers how they feel about your brand as soon as possible after they've interacted with it for the first time because many times these initial feelings will affect how they choose you in the future. Find out what is unique about their experience with your brand compared to others. How likely are they to recommend your product and services? What might stop them from doing so? What could you do differently?

4) Encouragement – motivates staff with empathy.

Encouragement is a catalyst for creativity and innovation. It helps staff shape your brand from being about you and your business to being about the customer's experience with it. It's a way of showing genuine interest in someone without trying too hard to be nice. It's about being able to have a more real, human interaction with your customers.

When employees are encouraged to be empathic, curious, and authentic, they can work together to build the right customer experience and improve it in a way that's genuine and unique. They will discover what makes your brand special and they will be able to help customers discover the same things about your brand.

5) Finding the right balance of warmth and honesty.

For any brand to be successful, it needs to have the right balance of warmth and honesty.

Warmth is about being kind, friendly, caring, and generous. It's about putting people first - putting the customer's experience with your brand ahead of anything else. Selfishness must not stand in the way of your brand being truly empathic. Warmth is what makes your brand unique by connecting with customers on a personal level.

Honesty is about being straight-talking, open, authentic, and genuine. It's about being able, to tell the truth without defending or justifying your way of doing things. Being honest makes customers more likely to trust you, be more loyal to you, and recommend you to others.

6) Knowing how to adapt and innovate.

Now that all of the above are in order, as a brand, you must focus on innovation using everything you've discovered about your brand's unique ability to connect with customers. You must be willing to consider challenging opportunities that are worth pursuing that will help your brand grow. You have to be willing to keep questioning everything that your brand does - asking "why?" over and over again.

You need the wisdom to know when change is necessary - when it's better to do things differently than they were done in the past - or when it's better not to change at all. You must be able to know when to stick with tradition and when to change your brand in a big way (the little things often add up and make a big difference).

The best brands are those whose brand story is unique, honest, empathic, encouraging, warm, purposeful, and innovative.