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How customer experience fuels your brand health

Posted by Perceptive Team - 29 September, 2014

We often talk about customer experience (CX) in isolation, but it’s important to understand that customer experience and brand are two sides of the same coin. Each one influences the other, from the expectations consumers have to how they perceive your brand through the customer journey.

With today’s consumer expectations set at an all-time high, understanding how each aspect influences the other within the context of your own business is fast becoming essential.

Here’s why.

 

How experience and brand are connected

At Perceptive, we define CX as all the points of interaction that a customer has with your organisation (stores, internet, social media, the employees and customer service centre, etc.). We employ the term “usage” when we describe when customers use a product or service and the experience they have with that product—including the product's brand or manufacturer.

As for “experience”, this refers to the set of expectations and emotions that are generated in our day to day activities—which often includes buying from brand as a customer. As we know, experiences can involve more than one emotion along with some rational evaluation as we consider whether the emotions we feel are positive or negative—along with any associations those feelings might evoke.

In the business setting, the emotional state a customer experiences with a product or service encourages the customer to take action—or not. Results of that emotion may reflect in positive or negative feelings they have towards the brand.

C13-How-CX-fuels-brand-health

 

Delivering on expectation

Whether we perceive our experience of a brand and its product as positive or negative is frequently influenced by expectation.

Ever sat down to watch a hotly anticipated movie only to feel that it didn’t live up to the hype? That’s a misalignment between expectation and experience. Worse still, it might not have even been a bad movie; it just didn’t wow you in the way you’d been set up to believe.

This happens in business too.

When a brand and the expectations it sets up delivers, a business has a good alignment between expectation and actual experience. However, when brand and experience aren’t aligned and don’t deliver, customers are invariably going to walk away disappointed.

At first glance, the simple solution is to not oversell or set up expectations you can’t deliver on. Problem is, brands don’t always get to set their consumers’ expectations. Expectations are constantly being set by other organisations, be it by competitors in your category to international companies, such as Amazon and Netflix, that have trained consumers across the board to expect ease of use and speedy delivery.

For this reason, it’s critically important to measure how your customers’ experience your brand to understand where your shortfalls in expectation are.

 

How experience builds memories—and strong and resilient brands

A brand is formed by the bundle of views, opinions and experiences that people have with it, which is often reflected by word of mouth, be it in person or online.

"We can say anything we like about our brand but if someone else says it, it is much more powerful." —Chris Pescott, Perceptive Founder.

 

Read more: 3 ways to boost your brand profile

 

With this in mind, a brand can be defined as the sum of BRAND = Opinions + Experiences + Connection with the media.  

In the old days, a brand only needed to focus on promoting its goods and services; the customer experience was left behind. Today, the crucial part of a brand is customers’ associated experiences with its product or service. The more a product/service adds value, the more of an impression it leaves in a customer’s mind.

According to Michael Porter, author of Competitive Advantage, having a valuable brand that delivers memorable experiences to customers is the best way to set a point of difference and protect your business from competitors who only offer lower pricing. Practical examples include Apple’s iPhone range, which offers exceptional product experiences, or Air New Zealand which created their Koru Lounge to deliver a memorable experience for their Koru Club members.

For this reason, top performing brands strive to offer superior experiences at every point of a customer’s interaction with them. Doing so helps them become unique and memorable in the mind of their customers.

 

In summary

For brands to succeed and remain resilient in today’s ultra-competitive environment, it is critically important to consider the impact customer experience is having on your brand health. Aligning your brand and customer experience to consistently provide positive and memorable moments will fuel how your brand is perceived by both your customers and the wider market.

 

Learn more about building, growing and scaling your brand in our free brand building guide.

Topics: Customer Experience, Brand Health


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