Brand Experience, Meet Customer Experience

If brand experience was an animal, it would be a pretty, flashy dog, specially groomed for dog shows. Conversely, customer experience can be likened to a trustworthy guide dog, that helps and follows you throughout.

In today’s fast-paced marketing world, it’s very important to differentiate between brand experience and customer experience. Sometimes these terms are mixed up and used loosely, but they represent two distinct concepts. The similarity is that both brand and customer experiences inherently focus on one thing – the customer. Brand experience kicks in from the start and is an ongoing process; it caters to both customers and non-customers. Customer experience follows closely behind, to guide your acquired customers when they are transacting or interacting with your brand.

While they differ in their approach, they are similarly rooted in consumers’ wants and desires. In order to engage and delight your audience, you’ll need to make your brand and customer experiences work together for best results. Let’s dig a little deeper to understand how they form part of an all-encompassing strategy to drive revenue for your organisation.

Design for Successful Brand Communication

The concepts of user interface and user experience have expanded beyond the scope of web design.

Broadly speaking, the user interface (UI) relates to design of an experience. Brand experiences rely heavily on design to communicate a certain message and value, in order to make consumers feel a certain way about the brand. UI design can often make or break your brand experience, and how your brand looks to consumers.

In contrast, user experience (UX) refers to a journey a customer must go through to reach the ultimate destination with your brand, which is purchasing it. Customer experience requires seamless UX for it to do its job properly.

The average person is exposed to more devices and channels than ever before. For the brand experience to succeed, customers must be able to seamlessly navigate across all of them. In today’s omnichannel landscape, traditional channels like TV, advertising and the physical shop floor alone are insufficient – you must also factor in increasingly popular online mediums such as websites and YouTube videos. Both types of channels must be well-integrated to deliver a complete, consistent brand experience. Confusing, poorly executed brand experiences could result in low customer satisfaction. You could end up losing both current and potential customers.

Louis Vuitton is a leader in luxury fashion partly due to its effective branding. Even its website’s design is engineered around a very particular image; these brands are very image driven, and they must project a certain kind of luxury around that. If you head down to its stores, you will find that every aspect there has to portray a particular look and value befitting the brand name. When experiencing the brand through the store or website, customers are made to feel that they’re worth it by being taken on a premium, out-of-this-world journey.

International trade marketing is also growing in size and importance within organisations. During my recent trip to Singapore, I noticed its world-famous Changi Airport was being utilised as a major channel for brand communication. Travellers have a lot of time to spare while in transit – surely, they’d love being pampered in a fancy, luxurious store like Louis Vuitton’s.

This method of brand communication recognises that it’s not just about showing or telling anymore. Beyond simply projecting value or experience, brands are reaching out to customers and spending more time to understand their wants, needs and preferences. For today’s brands, different channels serve different purposes – some do best at portraying their desired image, while others go deeper to engage and interact with consumers.

Customer Service Sustains Marketing

In most organisations, the marketing and customer service departments are perceived as separate. I would strongly argue otherwise. Indeed, brands heavily lean on their marketing, advertising and communications strategy – the aim is to conceive an experience, then promote it. Without any awareness, it’s almost impossible for customers to interact with your brand experience. Creating awareness is most important, because it is the launch pad for organisations to bring in new leads, create opportunities and ultimately motivate customers to purchase.

Yet all these can’t be sustained without customer experience, which relies heavily on service for success. Customer service must be present throughout every touchpoint of the consumer journey. Just like hunting for pearls in the ocean, you want to deep-dive into the consumer journey for the moments that matter. Your customers should be able to find service and guidance quickly and effortlessly; only then will your brand win them over.

Take German engineering brand Bosch as an example of quality customer service. It does not heavily spend on TV, radio or billboard advertising and occasionally engages in below-the-line communication like targeted and direct marketing. However, it is known for its expertise stemming from its German engineering heritage. Bosch has managed to incorporate the cultural expertise of Germans into its brand, and it mainly performs below-the-line store-level interactions with its customers. When customers go to its stores, staff will happily interact with them and highlight the quality, features and uniqueness of Bosch products.

For a brand like Bosch, installation becomes an important part of the brand experience, which it needs to maintain at this stage of the consumer journey and beyond. Suppose a customer calls and says, ‘I need the product installed by tomorrow, because I am hosting guests. Therefore it needs to be installed quickly!’ In this situation, would you swiftly grasp the importance of the call and aim to resolve this customer’s particularly urgent request? By doing so, you make the customer feel important and you can make this entire service a stream of revenue for the company.

It’s important to keep in mind that most services today are offered for free. Customers are moving towards two- or three-year subscriptions and are offered discounts and greater convenience if they sign up for an extended period with the service. While this is one method to attract customers, it can be marketed more effectively through premiumisation.

For instance, once you sign up for Netflix, you’re offered a trial period, but you’re also invited to purchase their Basic, Standard and Premium streaming services at the same time. Netflix understands that when you want customers to pay for your service, you must enrol them at the exact moment where they’re installing your product. That’s the moment where customers are highly involved with your brand - after they start using your service, it simply becomes a mundane, day-to-day aspect of their life. You’ve got to strike when the anticipation of using the product and the excitement of purchase is at its peak. By doing this, you can capitalise on your customer experience beyond the brand experience.

Activation and support come into play when we want to get practical with brand and customer experiences respectively. Brand experiences activate customers who may or may not know the brand. Activation aims to generate awareness. This can be accomplished through campaigns or programmes rolled out by your marketing department. However, just as customer service sustains effective marketing, customer support is crucial to giving your activations some extra bite.

To get a better idea of the strategies used to activate consumers, let’s look at an example of brand experience done right. Imagine a shampoo brand marketed at a kiosk in a shopping mall, drawing in ladies to experience a luxurious hair wash with their product. At that point, it’s about making them feel pampered, while appealing to their senses – the aroma, feel and consistency of the shampoo – and immersing them in the process. How are you supporting these people in the whole consumer journey? It’s about coming up with something relevant for the customer beyond the functional usage.

Take a brand like The Body Shop, which heavily emphasises its opposition to animal testing. This principle becomes a core purpose of its brand and it appeals to peoples’ ethical and moral beliefs, creating value beyond the quality of its products. It is thus creating a relationship with its consumers.

There’s also Patagonia, an American outdoor apparel brand, which has made sustainability a big part of its DNA. It recycles old clothes and buys them back from consumers. This encourages people to sell off their used clothing, while Patagonia obtains recycled material cloth which is extremely durable. It is not just paying to make its products more durable, but taking a pledge to actively make the world a better place to live in.

It’s time to think of support beyond the aspects of customer support and customer service. For brands dealing in fast-moving consumer goods, where you may not normally have much face-to-face customer support interactions, the key lies in how you elevate and appeal to consumers’ senses and ideals.

Don’t Let the Customer Down

To better understand how brand and customer experiences differ, consider what kind of impact they have on the consumer at the point or points of interaction.

Brand experience is a long-term strategy – it grows and develops with the business over time. When customers are continuously engaging with the brand experience, they create relationships along the way. The brand experience encourages consumers to see the business in a good light and promotes specific behaviours in return, particularly loyalty.

As a first step, you can create a positive brand experience by being present in the most viable touchpoints. Then, create relevant touchpoint experiences which suit that touchpoint specifically. And all of this will only be possible by being present at that moment. Hence, understanding the consumer moments of truth is of importance.

Customer experience is much more immediate. If customers can’t navigate the e-commerce website because the consumer journey is complicated and bulky, they will immediately reject your brand, leading to lost sales and even lost customers. It doesn’t matter how great your brand experience is if the customer experience is lacking.

Consider a telecom brand like Singtel. In the heart of Singapore’s urban area, I can see the 32-storey corporate headquarters of Singtel looming large, which conveys an impressive brand experience to me. Singtel’s stores are lively, flashy and welcoming, further contributing to a favourable brand experience.

On the other hand, customers occasionally experience a huge waiting time when calling Singtel’s customer service hotline; they may have to wait up to 45 minutes to get their questions resolved. Sometimes the staff may promise to call the customer back but reach out to them only after two days. In this scenario, it would only be a matter of time before customers see past the shiny exterior and start feeling discontent with their service interactions.

I have no grudge against Singtel, but through this I’d like to illustrate how a powerful brand experience can be hindered by a lagging customer experience. If your customer service fails to keep pace, your brand will only experience setbacks.

If you’re looking to craft a stellar customer experience, go through the following checklist:

• Understand and map your customer’s journey. This allows you to have a prior understanding of and mechanism to support the consumer’s moment of truth at a particular touchpoint.

• Create a superior experience from the very first touchpoint by understanding and applying insights you’ve gained on your customers’ pain points

• Maintain consistency in the experience at every touchpoint. A lack of consistency will make customers drop out.

• Engage in open dialogue with your customers to provide better customer experiences

Measuring Brand and Customer Experiences

We can’t talk about experiences without talking about feelings. Both the brand and customer experiences attempt to make the customer feel a certain way. However, they’re measured differently.

Measuring engagement of your brand experience can be done across a few quantitative data points. The number of potential customers passing by, successfully converted customers, how long they are spending at your store and even if they are making return visits – these statistics can be traced back to retail stores or other places of purchase. To prove or justify a brand experience’s return on investment, you should use reporting and surveys to gauge the level of engagement held by both customers and non-customers.

Conversely, customer experiences are typically measured in terms of satisfaction. When you log out from certain websites, you may be offered a CSAT (customer satisfaction) survey to rate your experience using their online products or services, likely on a scale of one to five or one to ten. You may even be asked whether you’re likely to recommend the same experience to someone else – this is known as the Net Promoter Score, which companies use to measure the loyalty of their customers. These are sometimes combined with a Customer Effort Score measurement, which aims to rate interactions with brands’ customer support services.

The key difference is that engagement can be tracked without customers’ direct input, whereas satisfaction is a quality that they willingly share with the business. Measuring satisfaction requires customers to communicate with the brand, using tools like a star rating or a survey. Customer satisfaction sends a clear, direct message about what they think of your brand, something that engagement alone can’t tell the full story about.

It’s clear that both brand and customer experiences are equally important for revenue growth and brand loyalty – they are strongly related to customers’ brand affinity and whether they’ll do business with you again. Each aspect works in a cyclical way, helping the other side to accomplish their goals. Successful product execution requires more than just coexistence, but the cooperation between brand and customer experiences.

Those that feel that they can go all-in on providing a superior brand experience while compromising their customer experience are due for a wake-up call. Throughout the consumer journey, people tend to consult review websites or YouTube videos to see what others are saying about your products. By looking at the reviews, potential customers are practically experiencing your products without using them. If they encounter like-minded people addressing the products’ pain points and service shortcomings at length, they’re going to walk away from your brand without looking back.

1.Integrate Your Brand and Customer Experiences

Have your brand experience and customer experience support each other. By doing so, you will capture more potential consumers and keep them coming back for more, increasing customer affinity and brand loyalty.

2. Make the Consumer Feel Good

Impressions are everything. Appeal to consumers’ senses and ideals to attract them to your brand, but don’t lose them all by providing subpar customer service. Maintaining good customer service and owning it as part of your brand experience will make you stand out.

3. Measure Customer Satisfaction

Communicate with your customers, combining customer satisfaction surveys, Net Promoter Scores and Customer Effort Scores to fully understand how they experience your brand. Engagement numbers won’t tell you everything you need to know about your products’ pain points.