360° Branding and the Customer Experience
Happy New Year !
To start off this new, exciting year I’ll be blogging a bit on the overall experience branding really is. Every now and then a business manager (from any and every department) comes and rants on how branding can be summed up in naming and advertising. This kind of thinking is just way off and never making a comeback.
Today, most managers must recognize branding as an objective, as a tool, as a means, and as an end. Or we can sum it up in simple, easy to remember wording: existence experience. Branding really is about the overall existence of the business and its brands. Branding strategies can be defined in the marketing department, but must extend to every single corner of the business, giving solid information and knowledge to the rest of the company.
One of the most branding-neglected areas on many companies is customer service. Whose reasoning I haven’t yet understood. Why are many marketing (who are supposed to be in charge of branding efforts) departments keep ignoring the customer service area of their biz. Have they no clue that his is the most important customer touchpoint?
I found these statistics at the SmallBusinessBrandingBlog.com by Robert Kingston. He got them from a speaker at the M Planet conference this year. Read them carefully and really internalize what these three stats mean. They’re much more powerful than what we really make of them:
* 43% of customers who leave a brand do so due to poor service.
* 77% of those people blame poor employee attitudes.
* Then, to top it all off, 83% of people who have bad service tell someone else.
That, right there, is an open window for business owners and marketing professionals to succeed in whichever industry they’re ‘playing’ in. To see those numbers and not grasp the enormous opportunity most customer service departments (and the people in charge of branding), is being blind by own will.
If we manage to close the gap on those numbers and turn the situation around, we might end up having a much more decent economy where not only will businesses be more healthy financially wise, but will have a far more happy and loyal customer base.
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POSTED IN: brand, brand loyalty, consumer
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