by Temel Aksoy
67. How
to Design Customer Experience
Marketers can create experiences that are peculiar to a brand by designing every feature that the user comes into contact with down to the minutest detail: from product design and packaging to the venue where the product is offered and after-sales service. The more sensory synergy a brand creates and the more personal the experience, the more lasting its impact will be.
Furthermore, an experience with significant story value also boosts the effect. The experience a person has with the brand turns into a personal story, strengthening the brand’s word-of-mouth communications. The fact that people take their own photographs at a restaurant or other location and share them on social media indicates that the story dimension of the experience is as important as the experience itself, and maybe even more important.
There is no universally applicable prescription for creating a successful brand experience, because every brand’s touchpoints and buying and consumption processes are different. However, certain principles of experience marketing are helpful for marketers to keep in mind.
Even if the company doesn’t have an intentional design, the user will inevitably have an experience when consuming the product or service. The important thing is not to leave this experience to chance but to manage the process.
To create original, authentic experiences, marketers must put themselves in the customer’s shoes and think like them. This issue may seem simple and straightforward, but failing to do this is, in fact, the reason that most brands fail. Difficult-to-understand user manuals, personnel without good diction working in call centers, sales and service personnel who can’t seem to resolve a customer’s problem when there is a malfunction, and processes that make shopping difficult on e-commerce websites are all due to the fact that companies tend to look at issues only from their own perspective. It’s easy to talk about putting yourself in the user’s shoes and thinking like them, and it’s not hard to understand the value of doing so, but it’s difficult to achieve. Companies that deliver a good experience are the companies that do these extremely simple things very well.
It’s impossible to predict most of the difficulties that users will encounter. The unexpected hitches that occur at places where the customers (consumers) encounter the brand are actually opportunities. If the company addresses these issues properly, it will improve its level of service. This is why it’s critical for company executives to live these experiences in the field, where people meet with the company’s products and/or services. Experience isn’t something that can be designed and then left to run on autopilot. The company must be constantly making improvements, eliminating some processes and introducing new ones.
To create a good user experience, the company needs support from all its stakeholders. User-friendly experiences are designed with input from employees, salespeople, suppliers and users.
Obviously, every company should seek inspiration from brands that deliver a good experience; they should use their good practices as a model. But every brand also has its own unique set of circumstances, and the user experience can only be designed in light of these circumstances. Brand symbols and rituals are essential elements of the experience. Brands should deliver a “branded experience.”
Rituals and personal interactions matter. However, it’s not just categories that develop relationships with their customers, like banking and cell phone operators, that have experiential value. The products sold in stores have experiential value as well. Experience marketing encompasses critical issues such as whether or not the packaging of a yogurt bought from the supermarket is easy to open and whether or not the cheese is easy to cut. To be able to grow and thrive, it’s just as important for a company to improve the user experience as it is to provide product innovation.
68. Wha
t Is the Consumer Decision Journey?
Today, marketers pay a lot of attention to the decision journey and how they can influence people at the different stages along its path. The decision journey people experience begins when they realize a need. Then, they acquire information about the product or services, evaluate their options and buy a brand. This journey is where attractive brand offerings and human psychological weaknesses meet, and it’s filled with many unknowns.
Even though people want to make the most rational decision, what they intend to do and what they actually do are never the same—due to not only the fluctuation in their own moods but also the opportunities offered by the brands they encounter. They’re often not even aware that they’ve changed their minds. What they had planned to do and what they actually do can be totally different.
Every day, customers spend money on things they never planned to buy, purchase things they don’t need, change their mind at the last minute in the store or buy something expensive instead of the more economic option. As is the case in almost every sphere of life, people are far from perfect when it comes to making good shopping decisions (details in chapter 14).
This is because people’s purchasing decisions are nothing like a computer evaluating all the options and choosing the best one. People employ their own generalizations and shortcuts (heuristics) at every stage of the decision journey. What’s more, on their decision journey, people are content to evaluate only a few of the options and not all of them. (Herbert Simon introduced this concept of consumer behavior, which he called “satisficing,” in his 1947 book, Administrative Behavior.)
Brands must also recognize that the consumer decision journey isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. The journey experienced when someone buys a car is different from purchasing a small electrical household appliance or makeup. The motivations, priorities, obstacles, worries and risks on every journey differ, not only from person to person but also from category to category. People are more likely to make snap decisions on products they purchase frequently, but the journey is more complicated and multistaged for products they buy less frequently or that are more expensive, like televisions, washing machines and automobiles.
No matter what the product category is, the decision journey, which is already inherently complex, has become even more complex in the Internet age. Information used to be available from a relatively limited number of sources, but the Internet has changed that dramatically. Now people choose brands based on the user comments they read on websites.
When the Internet first entered our lives, there was a distinction between the real world and the virtual world. This distinction has now been eliminated. Today, people look at their smartphones in the store and use the Internet to get information about the product they’ll buy.
A map of the decision journey shows the marketer all of the points at which a consumer may interact with the brand and its competitors. When companies create this sort of map for their own brands, they can study the stops on the journey and at which stops people make their decision, impacted by which factors. They can then use this information to shape their marketing strategy.
Though details vary depending on circumstances, the basic consumer decision journey consists of five steps. Even though most people make purchases without giving too much thought to these steps, or even skip some of them, we can summarize everyone’s decision journey as follows:
Emergence of need
Identifying options
Comparing and evaluating options
Making the purchase
Post-purchase evaluation
As you’ll recall from earlier chapters, people live their lives according to the principle of “least effort.” If possible, they want to make decisions and meet their needs without thinking (details in chapter 11). The journey described above is one we all take when we shop, but it may not be a journey we always plan well, analyze meticulously and scrutinize closely.
No matter what plan consumers make at home, everyone makes their final decision at the point of purchase. The calculations they make
at home are always subject to change based on the conditions of the market. If people can’t find the brand they want to buy when they go to the store, they can simply buy a rival brand without much thought, or they can succumb to the attractive offer of a rival brand.
Research has shown that more than half of the money that people spend at the store is spent on products they don’t plan on buying when they leave the house. This applies to more than just supermarket purchases. People may change their minds about the brand or model of car they intended to purchase at the last minute too. Whether it’s at a store or another point of sale, it’s extremely common for people to purchase a brand that they hadn’t even considered up to that point.
Outlining a decision journey map based on research provides us with tangible evidence about what opportunities exist for directing shoppers’ decisions toward a particular brand. The map shows us where the brand’s weaknesses are and where the competition’s strengths lie. This outside-in approach is extremely beneficial because it puts shoppers’ priorities ahead of the company’s priorities. This knowledge allows brands to plan how to meet customer needs at every stage of their decision-making.
BRAND COMMUNICATIONS
69. The
Purpose of Advertising Is to Create Brand Memory
The products and services that brands sell must advertise why, where, in what situations, when, with whom, with what and how people will use them. For example, there are specific situations in which the “need to drink something” is likely to arise. People want to drink something when they’re eating, watching TV or sitting on the beach. That’s why Coca-Cola advertisements show that Coca-Cola can be consumed
when eating at home,
when having a sandwich, barbecue or pizza at a restaurant,
when watching a game on TV,
when having a good time with friends at home,
when you want something cold at the beach,
when watching a game at the stadium,
after playing a pick-up game on the street with your friends,
. . . (Add your own scenario here.)
Rather than making a generic advertisement, Coca-Cola’s advertisements make people think of Coca-Cola in any situation where they might feel the need for a drink. Those moments when people need a product or service category are what Jenni Romaniuk calls “category entry points” (CEPs).
Every brand should aim to be the brand that comes to mind at those moments (CEPs) when people think of the category in question. Therefore, every brand should, to the extent that its budget allows, have a different advertisement for each CEP—or at least different advertisements for the most important CEPs. The more generic an advertisement is, the less effective it is. The more situation-specific it is, the greater its impact will be. That’s why people have a difficult time remembering advertisements that don’t capture a moment of need.
Brands that target those moments when people need a category and continue doing this for many years create brand memory in people’s minds. The more CEPs a brand is associated with, the more likely people are to buy that brand when they go shopping. Many brands use humor or celebrities in their advertisements. In such cases, they succeed in getting people to watch their commercials, but they actually miss the mark because they don’t build memory structure (as Byron Sharp says) by showing people when and where they’ll use the brand.
In fact, most advertisements fail when it comes to getting viewers’ (listeners’) attention. People don’t even notice most of the advertising on which companies spend exorbitant sums of money.
Some advertisements, however, do draw attention. The problem is, people get the message, but they don’t remember which brand delivered it. They don’t recall which brand the advertisement was for. Research conducted by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute indicates that, on average, 40% of advertisements are remembered, and an average of 40% of the ads people can recall are attributed to the correct brand. This tells us that the advertising success rate is, on average, 16%; in other words, 84% of advertising is ineffective.
This marketing research provides a benchmark for success: Every brand’s advertising performance goal should be greater than 16% (as Byron Sharp emphasizes in How Brands Grow).
70. How
Advertising Affects People
This may sound obvious, but to make advertisements that work, marketers need to understand how people respond to brand messaging.
Most marketers believe that people must be convinced of a brand’s superiority before they’ll buy the brand. This idea has a very long history. In 1897, copywriter and author Charles Austin Bates claimed that every advertisement required sound purchase justifications. In 1961, Rosser Reeves, the father of television advertising, said that every brand needs a “unique selling proposition.” Most contemporary marketing authors argue that the essential function of advertising is to persuade people. This approach, “strong advertising” or “hard-sell,” can be seen in the work of many advertising agencies.
The opposite view believes that the purpose of advertising is not to persuade people but to plant the brand in their minds and ensure that they remember it. Advertising pioneers Theodore MacManus and, later, Raymond Rubicam argued that the function of advertising was to attract people’s attention, create in them an emotional response and consequently create memory structure (as Byron Sharp says) in their mind. Advertisers who take this approach create advertising that’s interesting and creates positive emotional responses instead of trying to persuade the customer by describing how the brand is superior. This view, which is also defended by Andrew Ehrenberg, posits that this type of advertising, “soft advertising” or “soft-sell,” makes sure the brand is etched into people’s memory, because the ads are interesting and create positive emotions in the audience. (For more details on both approaches see Fred K. Beard’s book Humor in the Advertising Business.)
Both anecdotally and from my own work in market research, I’ve seen that people don’t usually have any particular interest in advertising. They don’t want to watch commercials. On the contrary, they try to avoid commercials as much as possible. However, creative advertisers manage to capture the audience’s attention. That’s why the language of advertising must be more emotional than logical (details in chapter 8).
Obviously, an advertisement should provide or imply a logical justification for choosing a brand, but reason alone won’t mobilize anyone. For advertising to be effective, a brand must explain in emotional terms how it helps people, because if human memory is fuel, emotions are the sparks that ignite it. Any message devoid of emotion is destined to be forgotten and will have no effect on decisions or behavior (details in chapter 13).
Advertising that tries to persuade people of the superiority of a brand fails for two reasons. First, as we all know from our own lives, changing someone’s mind or persuading them is not an easy task. The human mind manifests a natural resistance to persuasion. People like their own ideas, not the ideas of others. Second, consumers (customers) may, in accordance with the marketing laws, buy one brand on one shopping outing, but they may buy the competitor’s brand in the same category on their next outing (details in chapter 24). Frantically trying to explain the differences or superior traits of brands that consumers view as basically the same is an exercise in futility. It’s a waste of resources (details in chapters 37, 38 and 39).
On the other hand, advertising to create memory structure supports, rather than works against, human behavior. One of the most prominent traits of the human mind is its affinity for people, objects and concepts that it frequently hears and sees. The more a brand advertises itself and the more recognition it has, the more popular it will be. As a general rule, familiarity breeds favorability (exposure effect, details in chapter 14). This is why advertising doesn’t have to be designed to convince people. Ads only need to be seen, recognized, understood and attributed to the brand in
question to be effective.
Most importantly, brand advertising must associate the brand with those moments (category entry points, or CEPs) when people need the product or service in question (instead of trying to convince shoppers of how superior the brand is). Any brand that devotes an adequate budget to long-term advertising using creative and emotionally laden language will leave an imprint on people’s minds. This is the creation of brand memory (details in chapter 69).
Recently a contribution to this topic came from two people working in the field of advertising: Les Binet (head of effectiveness at the Adam & Eve DDB agency) and Peter Field (strategic planner and consultant). Binet and Field evaluated 497 advertisements on the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising databank, dated between 1998 and 2016. They looked at the advertising approach of each piece of ad copy and the sales results that each one achieved. From this review, they determined that there are two approaches to advertisement, which they coined “Brand Advertisement” and “Activation Advertisement.” The former is close to, but not the same as, “soft-sell advertising” and is effective in the long term, and the latter is close to, but not the same as, “hard-sell advertising” and pushes the potential buyer to buy the brand in the short term. Binet and Field concluded that neither of these approaches is sufficient when used separately. To get results, brands should mix both approaches and allocate 60% of their budget to “Brand Advertisement” and 40% to “Activation Advertisement.”
71. The
Best Advertisement Uses a Story
Telling a story is the most effective way to communicate a message.
