How brand teams can lead digital transformation

Resilient brands are obsessed with how their brand is perceived by their customers. This is because branding is all about perception. Brands want customers to like them, to trust them, to have a good impression of them – and of course to buy from them again and again. But is this is enough to get them to invest in a customer experience-focused digital transformation? Probably not.

A survey conducted by Accent found that customers that have a positive experience with a brand are:

• 80% more likely to make additional purchases
• 27% more likely to join a loyalty programme
• 79% more likely to tell family and friends
• 36% more likely to write online reviews
• 32% more likely to subscribe to email updates

The key takeout from the research is that in order to maximise return on investment, brands need to understand and engage with customers across the entire lifecycle, not just pre-purchase. The expectation for brand teams is shifting from brand management to brand experience design. 

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
-  Warren Buffet 

So how can you bring your brand team up to speed?

Customer journey mapping for brand teams

Mapping your customers’ journeys allows you to explore, assess and document their experiences across multiple channels and touchpoints. It provides a deeper understanding of how they experience the brand.

At Brilliant Noise, we facilitate customer journey mapping workshops for clients teams to build internal collaboration and commitment to customer experience improvements.

We help our clients identify how customer journeys relate to brand by finding:

• weak links in the brand journey
• opportunities to create positive moments
• the most effective touchpoints to communicate the brand message
• what your customers think and when
• how to gather more valuable customer data

These sessions can act as a wake-up call for your team, by highlighting where the brand should focus to drive transformation and growth. This example from Rail Europe illustrates the depth of insights and directions such an exercise can provide.

Customer journey mapping is there to:

• help the business become customer-centric
• make the customer experience a unique asset and IP in the category
• increase trust and advocacy
• add new methodologies to capture customer data
• increase resilience to change in technology
• nurture a digital mindset throughout all teams
• foster collaboration cross-function for the benefit of customers

We offer custom, hands-on journey mapping workshops to help your team get on with it and deliver fast impact. At Brilliant Noise, we believe in brands designed around a common purpose that is true to customers, a marketing strategy that unites bottom up and top down communications around this purpose and a customer experience that brings it to life. If you’d like to read more about our approach to branding for the digital age, please download our Resilient Brands book.

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This post was originally shared on Brilliant Noise's blog on September 22nd.