What Has Brand Got To Do With Customer Experience Anyway?

To you, from me, a woman who wants to raise the bar in experience.

I was asked this week how I would define brand and I said:

‘Brand is always about them, not you’.

By ‘them’ I mean people. People have the power to become your customers.

Those surface level things that we often attach to what a brand is i.e logos, fonts, styles etc. are nice, but they pale into insignificance compared to the thing that I believe is most fundamental about brand, that is ‘the meaning and/or feeling that someone attaches to your brand’.

Brand will always be about your customer and how they feel about you. Without that, you don’t have a brand. You simply have a set of stylings, logos and fonts that look nice. But what for? 

Without people, you don’t have a brand.

That’s why creating good experiences with you is paramount. Experience has the ability (if it’s good) to create feeling. Positive feeling builds brand.

I’ve spent some time over the summer doing some of my own brand design and development. I even had a ‘Branding Wall’ created by a very talented lady called Hayley Smith

This wall is to sit behind the videos that I produce. It has interchangeable logo plaques that can be moved up and down so it is present whether I am filming sitting down, or stood up. We also decided to create a logo in reverse so that it would show the right way around when videos were filmed in selfie mode on some of the social media platforms. It was planned very carefully and I’m thrilled with the result, if you’re reading this, thank you Hayley! 

Alongside this, I’ve been making some changes to some of my website areas, I’m refining an eBook and I’ve changed one of my business card designs. 

Although this has all been necessary work (and work I’m thrilled with) it is what I would put into the category of ‘superficial brand work’ - the nice-to-haves! 

The most important brand work I’ve done over the past few weeks has been in the experiences I have created with the people in my network. This has been the conversations I have had with my clients, the direct messages I’ve exchanged to build potential brand relationships on social media platforms, the comments I’ve replied to on my own social media content, the engagement with others' social media content, the telephone conversations I’ve had with suppliers and colleagues and the face-to-face (yes we can do that now with care and safety) meetings I’ve had to build rapport and relationships! 

It is THAT kind of work that builds brands, the relationship building and experience creating stuff. 

When I reflect over the past few months of the pandemic, although I have needed to adapt my business methods and work longer and more intense hours, I feel pretty lucky and grateful that my business has been relatively unaffected (touch wood!) by the events going on in the world. I put this down to hard work, but most importantly, the depth of relationship I have with my clients. 

Working in consultancy, I’m not looking for hundreds of customers, so when I share this following advice, please only apply it if you are a brand who is not searching for hundreds and thousands of customers, that requires a different (similar, but different) relationship building approach.

The advice I would give for brand building is to build deep. A network is only as good as the depth of the relationship you have with them. You can have thousands of people in your network and no customers whatsoever. You have to nurture (and nurture well) the depth of your relationships, not just the volume of how many you have. 

Strong relationships build strong brands.

To build strong relationships you need to build great experiences with you. 

What practical steps can you take in the weeks ahead to do this? 

The below ideas will be especially useful for service providers but can be tailored for product too.

1.) Build time into your schedule for relationship building. If you are building time in for content creation and business development then you need to be building in the relationship building time too. This could be 30 minutes a day to engage digitally with other people’s content and start direct (non-sales related) conversations.

2.) Pick up the phone and call your clients. It’s important to get the balance right here, you don’t want to be disrupting people's days with small talk, but it is perfectly fine to call to ask how things are going. I have always found this is welcomed with a positive and grateful response. Make sure to gauge this with your own clients, you know them better than I do – remember this is to build strength in relationship, not to be a nuisance. Figure out what will work with each client individually and then apply! 

3.) Make yourself accessible (I DO NOT, AND I REPEAT DO NOT MEAN CONTINUOUSLY). Allocate some time in your calendar when people are able to access you / your expertise directly. This could be in a live stream capacity, it could be that you invite your digital audiences to ask you questions from within your content. It could be that you send a newsletter (like I’m doing here), but make some time where people feel like they are having direct access to you and your knowledge. This is a great relationship builder when someone is either new or relatively new to you. It’s a great way to start building an experience with you and could open a potential door to prospecting.

4.) Create conversations with suppliers / colleagues. Strong supplier / colleague / employee conversations build good experience. When everyone within the business is happy and having a good experience, that filters externally to the people who engage with you and it gives them a good experience too. A happy brand culture will always shine. When there is a good external experience, that builds brand.

5.) Chat it out over a coffee (or a gin if it’s that time of the day). I always used to love that saying ‘The best relationships are built on the golf course’. It may be a bit cliché, but I believe it to be more true than ever. People still value those face-to-face interactions. In fact, it appears (from my experience) to be more valued, since the lifting of restrictions. Make sure you are following safety measures, but arranging a coffee / lunch with a member of your network is a sure fire way to create a good experience and build that positive feeling towards your brand.Remember, it’s making the effort to deepen relationships that strengthens brand. 

So, what has brand got to do with customer experience anyway? 

A LOT.

Brand IS People Experience.

Brand IS Customer Experience.

If you are spending all of the time on you and not on them, then you are missing the entire point of brand. 

Brand is about them. Make sure you allocate time to building relationships and good experiences with you and watch your brand flourish.

Next month’s newsletter will discuss why Customer Experience is so hard, but I'm going to help make it more manageable for you. 

It will be full of insight.

If you would like more insight into Customer Experience and Brand, I was invited to join a webinar with Matt Davies to discuss these topics.

You can watch the recording here

Until next month, make it about them and keep raising the bar in experience.

Victoria.