What relationship do your customers want with your brand?
For quite some time now, marketers the world over have been fighting increasingly tougher battles to win over and keep their customers. Most observers seem to lay blame on:
a) the rising standard of products
b) the growing cadre of ‘good enough’ competitors and
c) the negligible risk of technical product failure
rendering sustainable product/performance based differentiation moot for all but the most focused world class product innovators and market disruptors who are able to redefine and establish advantageous segment barriers.
What about the rest? Many are coming to the viewpoint that their ability to compete and differentiate will lie in two arenas. The first being situational ‘relevancy’, the second -branded experiences.
While the branded experience arena leads to emotion based strategies, that approach will only be successful against those customers who are open to having an emotional relationship with the brand. Furthermore marketers must remember that emotion is but ONE brand relationship dimension - that others may have a transactional, logical or mature/external/we-centric brand relationship instead. This simply acknowledges that not all brands have legions of emotionally charged customers so why try to push strings? Instead by knowing the type of relationship customers want to have with the brand, marketers take an important first step in being able to communicate effectively with their customer in the ‘language’ they will be more receptive to.
Let’s take shoes laces as an extreme example. Most will have little affinity for brands in the category and gravitate toward expediency or value at the Moment of Truth. However consider a mountain climber who is likely more interested in product performance or perhaps even swayed by a testimonial from Sir Edmund Hillary. How about a teenager - probably ambivalent – unless the brand manager develops some ‘hip shoelaces’ for that group. Or perhaps another constituency that will look favorably upon the shoelace company for its good works, greenness etc…
So smarter marketers will not expend resources trying to accomplish the less effective/expensive/impossible and play the cards they are dealt – at least in the near term while giving their relationship-migration programs a chance to take root.
The next part of this puzzle is to track the mix of Communication, Experience and Overture (CEO) events being directed to the different customer segments that result in a purchase. The intent being to document the sequence of (campaign) elements associated with a purchase. And by identifying balanced programs, the manager minimizes the risk of becoming unduly price focused, commoditizing the brand in pursuit of short-term results.
Anyone interested in a greater elaboration of this view point and model are kindly directed to this link (Anatomy of a Brand Purchase).
