Marketers today are faced with consumers who churn more frequently than ever and a technology landscape that’s lowered the barriers to entry for competitors. Plus, in our digital world, there are infinitely more channels for communicating with customers.
This means marketers now have less time, more channels, and more competition to contend with. Brand experience management is essential to cut through the noise.
The definition of marketing is moving goods and services from the source of tools, channels, and mechanics to the consumer, but most marketers haven't adapted for digital - and that's a BIG problem.
For many organizations, facing these challenges means prioritizing brand management and brand experience management. What’s the difference?
Brand management focuses on managing your brand identity and working to improve your audience’s perception of your brand to build awareness, equity, and loyalty.
Brand experience management is managing, strategizing, measuring, and impacting all aspects of the customer experience with your brand.
After years of focusing on performance marketing strategies, companies are realizing the importance of long-term brand strength, which is promoting a pivot to brand-led marketing. This pivot means marketers will need to execute brand awareness strategies, but also monitor brand performance over time.
Brands are designing a sensory experience that not only builds lasting relationships, but impacts the bottom line.
The most successful businesses focus their branding strategies and investments on activities designed to train consumers’ muscle memory through delivering on their needs, time and time again, and making it easy to recognize their brands in the crowd.
They usually share these characteristics:
Over time, when consumers interact with a brand, those experiences form attitudes and perceptions in consumers’ minds, leading people to like one brand over another.
When making a purchase, people will gravitate to the brand they associate with positive experiences.
Marketing metrics often overlook the high rate of e-commerce product returns, which is extremely costly to retailers. As global e-commerce continues to grow, the amount of returns is expected to cost retailers more than a trillion dollars a year.
World-class brands use similar tools to grow and embed themselves into the culture.
For a modern brand to have insight, a mission, authenticity, visibility and consistency, it needs to manage and measure brand experience with digital tools.
These brands have access to insights that are actionable and engrained throughout the organization. They’re empowered to deliver experiences that resonate with both customers and employees. They build their reputation with on-target messaging and delivering on every brand promise at every touchpoint.
Leading brands also have the knowledge to build emotional connections, understand market conditions and competitors, and know how they stack up at every stage in the brand funnel. They can predict how marketing will impact their brand and respond quickly to new opportunities by activating the entire organization on the fly.
A holistic brand experience program can bring together all of the tools and intelligence needed to measure brand identity and the experiences it inspires.
These include tools that enable the following:
Consumer perceptions of a brand are impacted by many factors outside of marketing’s purview, such as product development and employee experience. So, it’s essential to include your HR teams, product development, and customer service functions as you look to deliver on the brand experience.
The world’s most iconic brands start with a purpose; they design products to deliver it, align their employee cultures behind it, enable their teams to deliver on it, and inject it into every touchpoint with their customers.
The marketing team simply pulls the strings to find the best way to communicate it, over and over again, on the right channels, to the right people, to plant it firmly in consumers’ minds.
