Marketing and Branding are the first contacts you have with your Customers. Your brand is the promise you make to your Customers. Your experience is how you deliver on that promise. Surprisingly, too many organizations don’t deliver on the brand promise they made in their Marketing and Branding efforts, causing a disconnect between the two.
We use a Customer Experience Assessment model called Naive to Natural to assess whether companies focus on Customers primarily. Today in our seventh post about the nine parts of the company that determine your Customer-Centricity, we are taking a close look at Marketing and Branding and the seven reasons they are disconnected from the Customer Experience.
7 Reasons Brand and Customer Experience Are Disconnected
- Senior managers are not committed to the brand. They like the TV ads; they think the brand promise sounds good in concept. They haven’t, however, brought the brand promise concept and applied it to the day-to-day activity of the company.
- People throughout the organization don’t know the Brand Values. Many companies don’t share the brand values with their entire team. The most Customer-centric companies, however know that everyone from the CEO to the entry-level employee need to be well-versed in the brand values of the company.
- Customer-facing employees are not briefed on Marketing campaigns. Another area sorely lacking awareness is the current marketing campaigns. The most Customer-centric companies share their campaigns with their team, particularly the customer-facing members before they go live, accompanied by training on how to deliver the principles advertised.
- Brand values have not been aligned with the Customer Experience. Sometimes the problem can be that the organization has never made an effort to align the brand promise to what the current customer experience is delivering. Customer-centric companies, however, understand that this is imperative and have a formal mechanism to ensure that it occurs.
- Advertising is focused on product and price, not the brand experience.What a company values is what they focus on in their advertisements. If the focus is product and price, you can gather that the organization is focused there too. However, if the ad focuses on the emotions a Customer has a result of using the product, you see the organization is focused on the Customer.
- Market research is conducted by product attributes and pricing, not emotional experience by the customers. If advertising tells you what is important to an organization, so too does the focus of the Market research. Companies whose marketing research is limited to product attributes and pricing are not focusing on the experience the product delivers. The most Customer-focused organizations are sure to research the emotional responses their customers have that add value to the experience.
- Marketing is not perceived to be a key function of the organization. When marketing is seen as a support department to sales or described as the “ones who do the brochures,” the organization does not see them as a key element to the organization. Companies emphasizing how marketing is critical to how the organization performs as a whole have a Customer focus driving their actions.
The vast majority of companies today know that putting the Customer at the heart of everything they do is important. Furthermore, they know that the promise that the brand makes in its marketing message are what needs to match the Customer Experience they deliver. It’s the actual doing of this that seems to flummox them.
The question becomes, are you one of the organizations working to change this or one of the ones who allows an operational focus to hurt your Marketing and Branding’s influence on the Customer Experience?
How do you connect your Marketing and Branding with your customer experience? I would be interested to hear your tips in the comments below.
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To learn more about Beyond Philosophy’s Naïve to Natural Model, please register for our Naïve to Natural Certification beginning February 2, 2015.
Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world’s first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four best-selling books and an engaging keynote speaker.
Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX