Branding Articles
Turning Customer Service into a Positive Customer Experience
When organisations are espousing commitment to customer service, shouldn’t they really be talking about the customer experience? Commitment to delivering a positive experience will build loyalty to your brand and ensure you hold the heart and mind of your customer. This in turn will differentiate your business from competitors and create clear advantage, at same time realising positive impact on the bottom-line.
It’s very important to distinguish service from experience because, in this context, service is just the mechanism for delivering the experience to the customer; whilst it’s the experience itself which builds an emotional connection between your customer and the brand. The customer experience will encompass every aspect of your brand’s offering. Therefore good products backed up by quality service will result in a positive experience. For example, Dell managed to turn the risky process of buying a computer over the internet into a reliable and positive experience by making improvements that focused on mitigating their customer’s perceived risk.
Congruent Brand & Culture
With globalisation, Brands are so much more than just products and logos. They’re channels of self expression which transcend the label of ‘commodity’. Avenues through which most people express their personalities, attitudes, likes, dislikes and association to certain groups and communities. Brand is strategic, a long term imperative requiring Leadership to carefully consider and manage it across the entire organisation. This usually takes a collaborative effort involving both the HR, and Marketing Departments, which is best achieved through forming a Brand Steering Committee which can strategically understand the whole of business requirements.
Minimising Brand Risk
Brand equity moderates the impact of marketing initiatives upon consumer actions and represents one of many factors contributing to overall Brand Value. Most people relate to the benefits of a relatively strong brand (greater loyalty, premium pricing of products/services, ability to attract and retain the best talent, higher stock price etc) yet the reality is that this information hasn’t hit home to motivate and generate similar interest in the safeguarding of the Brand.
Brand equity represents what a Brand means to the consumer – loss of that brand equity makes organisations vulnerable. This can be brought on by activities such as focusing the brand into too many product areas; changing the name / face of a brand or its highly recognised visual brand elements; and especially through loss of consumer trust in services or products offered.
Importance of Investing in Brand During a Downturn
Branding in a down turn is all about investing in retaining your customers, (and attracting new ones) and keeping those lines of quality communication open to both employees and customers. You may have considered or even cut budgets to accommodate a shifting demand curve but cutback strategies such as this can actually do more damage to your company and it’s brand, especially if this involves team, or sales & marketing budgets.
Brand – Driving your bottom line!
A company’s culture really is its internal brand (what you stand for to your employees, stakeholders and vendors). Internally, culture plays a major part in driving revenue. Your customers and employees are human after all and operate on emotion.
Internal brand/culture is more than just this – it is about employee expectations and their behaviours (adhering to what makes your Company so unique). So how does internal brand/culture really have an effect on revenue?
Branding and Marketing – The Primary Differences
Important differences exist between branding and marketing and whilst the two are important, they are quite diverse.
Differentiation and ownership is a key component of any Branding process. The mental image, strong emotional connection and understanding in your customer’s mind about your product or service is considered brand. This usually involves establishing differentiated identity, philosophy and personality around your company, product or service which fulfils a specific customer want or need. Branding then really is the promise your company makes to the customer and employees, and the relationship you have with them.