Brands are quick to identify customer experience as an area of critical success for them. Yet too often those responsible for its delivery lack the authority or the experience to fully act in the interests of those customers.
There’s a lot of things that brands keep doing that can turn their value south. By way of a checklist, these are the things I see happening far too often.
An observation from the Havas CES 2016 report that we will increasingly see more companies working together across widely different marketplaces is a reminder of the new bridges that brands must be looking to build going forward. Inevitably these invite new approaches.
Is flexibility replacing footprint as the new black for global brands? That’s the inevitable question as Walmart announces a major redraft of its stores policy.
It seems everywhere I look in the marketing press these days, someone is advocating the need for brands to deliver experiences. But not everyone can or should deliver a formatted experience, and, equally, some brands would quickly wither if they didn’t.
Successful brands have a story that connects them with their audience and that forms the backbone of their strategy. But if you’ve been around a while, the story that your loyal customers know is not yet shared by those who are new to the brand. Here are 4 ways to connect your longer story to those who don’t know it as well.
In The Smarter Screen, Shlomo Benartzi lays out a world where we are besieged by choices; choices that, far from helping us to make better decisions, confuse us into behaving in ways that are actually less informed.
We shouldn’t even think of the term “customer service” as being about something that is valuable to customers. In fact, customer service is worth next to nothing. The reasons are simple. We live in a service-focused age, and the people who buy from you know they’re customers. So the term “customer service” does not describe anything customers don’t expect and it certainly doesn’t envelope anything of particular value to them.
Disclaimers are everywhere. From the websites we visit to the products we buy and the ads we watch, the terms under which consumers read and receive are carefully wrapped in legal bubble-wrap to protect brands from liability. In an age of transparency, such disclosures seem prudent and very much in keeping with the demands of today. You know where you stand. The terms for what you are getting are laid out in explicit detail. Or are they?
Personalisation is the quest of the moment for so many marketers, with 70% of executives interviewed by Forrester saying it is now of strategic importance to their business. (What may surprise you, as it did me, is how generalised so much marketing still is.)
