Classifying CX Initiatives – Part Four Brand Building

In Part One of this series, three initiative buckets were introduced. The initiatives designed to retain customers related to:

• Competitive parity
• Retention
• Brand building

In this part, we examine CX initiatives designed to link the promises embodied in marketing communications, with the operational performance of the business.  In doing so, the brand promise aligns with the customer experience.

 

 

Alignment Between Brand and Experience

In the pursuit of acquiring new customers, promises are made to the market.  Brand building CX initiatives are the link between marketing and operational performance.  Honoring brand promises with the delivered customer experience might seem an incredibly obvious goal however, in our experience, it is the most neglected of the CX initiatives buckets.

There are structural reasons why the convergence between brand and CX has been slow to take effect.  Simply, marketing often “owns” the brand, and operations often “owns” experience.  In the absence of the Chief Customer Officer, it is challenging for the organization to take an all-encompassing lens and for the marketing and operations fiefdoms to contemplate ceding territory or even just coordinating.

From a statistician’s perspective, it is not surprising that the drivers of sales are different from the drivers of retention.  After all, reflecting the business outcomes, the dependent variables or outcomes are different (broadly CX=retention and brand=acquisition) and therefore, the modelled independent variables (areas for action) are also ordinarily divergent.  On that basis, there seems little natural scope for convergence between brand and CX.

There are also practical reasons for the divergence.  A brand promise tends to be at the helicopter level whereas, a customer experience commitment is built across a myriad of organizational touchpoints, interactions, and initiatives.  And yet, organizations are cognizant of the need for operations to reflect the brand promise and at the same time, not detract from the day-to-day CX work.

 

There are criminal sanctions for organizations and executives not aligning marketing promises with customer experience

 

However, and perhaps above all, there is a clear need for organizations to forge the link between brand and CX.  The requirement of organizations to match promises with experience is encapsulated in antitrust, misleading, and deceptive conduct legislation.  In some jurisdictions, there are criminal sanctions for organizations and executives not aligning marketing promises with the customer experience.

 

How Many Brand Promises?

When it comes to marketing communications and making brand promises, great marketers subscribe to a philosophy of brutal singularity.  In our experience, the best practice in effective marketing communications is the Communications Triple Play.  Brands communicate price competitiveness; quality and a primary discrete emotion involved in the consumption/use of the product/service.  In those communications which are most effective at driving consumption behavior, emotion is implicitly elicited and price can be either implicitly or explicitly communicated.  The single quality element is the choice attribute that the brand has decided to be distinctive on (i.e. reputation or performance-based).  This is sometimes referred to as the North Star.

 

The North Star is the superordinate brand promise which should be drawn from the mathematically derived, choice drivers

The North Star is the superordinate brand promise which should be drawn from the mathematically derived, choice drivers.  Because the North Star is the preeminent brand promise, it must be matched with customer experience.  Indeed, the North Star should be the primary link between the brand and CX.

 

The greatest risks associated with developing a North Star occur when it is developed using opinion or instinct rather than science which identifies the customers’ choice drivers.  In this instance, the North Star runs the distinct risk of becoming a distraction from the commercial goals of the enterprise.  Our strongly held contention is that the North Star should encapsulate a primary driver (modelled to acquisition and/or retention) of behavior and it forms the backbone of the linkage between experience and brand.

It is the responsibility of the organization to ensure such marketing promises are honored and that customer experience matches the promise.

 

 

Photo by Rubén Bagüés on Unsplash