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How well does your Brand Experience live up to the Brand’s Promise?
14 March 2025
Using a customer-centric approach to overcome the double jeopardy of brand experience.
By Jon Wilkins
This fourth part of our six-part series exploring the key success factors that are likely to shape the fortunes of your brand explores why it is so essential to provide a Brand Experience that follows through on your Brand Promise and meets the expectations it creates.
If you missed our three earlier articles you can catch up on Brand Salience, Brand Accessibility or Brand Promise by clicking on them here.
Strive for constant improvement of the whole brand experience
Any marketing or sales professional knows it is not always easy (or cheap) to find new customers so, when we do find them, we want to give them an experience that lives up to their expectations and makes them want to use our brand again and again.
Get it right and they may even persuade others to give your brand a go. Get it wrong and they probably won’t be back - or worse, they may even spread negative sentiment about your brand!
“Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5% to 25% times more expensive than retaining an existing one.” Harvard Business Review.
The user experience is a huge opportunity to shape and reinforce perceptions of your brand. That’s why it’s so important to take the brand experience into account if you want a complete understanding of what drives its performance.
The double jeopardy of brand experience
Imagine that you have successfully created expectations of your brand and convinced a new customer to try it. Every aspect of their experience will define what happens next.
If your brand experience fails to meet the customer’s expectations sufficiently, you are likely to lose them and will need to replace them with another newly acquired customer (for at least five times the cost of keeping them). With costs of acquisition growing, this can be an expensive and time-consuming activity.
88% of consumers trust their friends' recommendations over traditional media.
If you meet or exceed their expectations, you will not only avoid the hefty costs of replacing them but may also benefit from their positive Word of Mouth. 88% of people around the world said they trust recommendations from people they know above all other forms of advertising (according to a 2021 Nielsen ‘Trust in advertising’ study).
In a nutshell, if your brand experience meets or exceeds expectations you will avoid substantial acquisition costs and benefit from free advocacy for your brand through positive Word of Mouth (WOM). You will also avoid unwelcome negative WOM that can have the reverse effect.
Don’t just take our word for it. Research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the Net Promoter Score) shows that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%.
Strive for constant improvement of the whole brand experience
Your brand experience is much more than just satisfaction with a single product or service encounter. It’s the whole customer journey and everything that wraps around it; before, during and after the moment of purchase. Every step is an opportunity to meet, exceed or fall short of your customer’s expectations.
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little better.” Jeff Bezos.
Consumer expectations of product and service experiences do not stand still. The bar is set ever higher by advances in technology, competitor innovation, and availability of information comparing the quality of experience from different brands. Our own analysis of what drives brand attitudes across multiple categories shows that functional aspects of the brand experience have been playing an increasing role over recent years, emphasising the importance of getting it right.
That’s why the most successful brands understand what’s most important to their customers and constantly strive to improve every aspect of the customer journey. They keep up with growing expectations, ideally exceeding them.
“The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them - preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” Richard Branson.
Having a clear and effective plan to identify, understand and improve the weak points in your brand experience is therefore key to attract new customers, protect your existing customer base, drive more value from them and build external perceptions of your brand.
Five ways to optimise your brand experience.
Nobody knows your brand experience better than your customers.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates
A customer-centric, listening approach is therefore pivotal to making your brand experience the best it can be. Here we outline five key ways to achieve it. If you are already doing some of them, then great! You are already on your way.
1) Understand what the customer journey looks like.
The customer journey doesn’t just start with clicking on the ‘pay now’ button or scanning your item at the point of sale.
- Do you understand all of the key touchpoints that could influence their decision and shape the expectations that your brand will ultimately be judged against?
- Do you understand every aspect of the user experience through their eyes?
- Do you understand what happens post-purchase and what factors affect the chances of repeat custom?
Consider exploratory research techniques that take a deep dive into the customer journey and help understand what matters most using ethnographic techniques, customer journey mapping or other specialist approaches. Refresh your understanding occasionally to make sure you are staying in touch.
2) Get regular feedback on every touch point.
Do an audit of all the key touchpoints in your brand experience. Use your customer journey mapping to help make sure you have feedback on the most important steps of the process covered, whether that means different touchpoints or service channels and whether they occur before, during or after the moment of purchase.
Feedback should be regular, rapid, and agile, enabling you to be responsive to pain points throughout the customer journey.
More widely, assess the user experience, test products, and use co-creation sessions to get granular feedback and surface new ideas and opportunities that can help keep your experience at the forefront.
3) Keep an eye on the big picture.
Avoid getting bogged down exclusively with feedback on individual touchpoints. Ensure you regularly capture feedback at a ‘whole customer’ level. This will help you prioritise resource via a more holistic view of the brand experience, understanding what matters most to your customers and where you most need to make progress.
Consider regular Customer Experience Tracking and enhancing it further with other creative ‘voice of the customer’ techniques to bring insights from the survey to life.
4) Be outward looking as well as inward looking.
There is much to be learned about your brand experience by listening to the world beyond your customer base:
- Do you know why lapsed customers have stopped using your brand?
- Do you know what’s putting potential new customers off trying your brand in the first place? And if it’s their expectation of the brand experience, what is driving this perception?
- Are you regularly monitoring your brand’s sentiment across social media channels?
- Are you able to compare the advocacy levels for your brand against competitive benchmarks that are relevant to your market and brand?
5) Don’t just listen, act.
Most important of all, know when and how to act.
Once you have your customer-centric radar switched on, you may be overwhelmed with input and possibilities. Realistically, you may not be able to address every issue straight away and some feedback may even point toward conflicting solutions. Use your understanding of what’s most important to help you prioritise but remember to improve the little things that are quick fixes. Collectively they may add up to more than the sum of their parts.
And finally, when appropriate, tell your customers that you have listened and what you have done (or are planning to do) about it. It will encourage them to give constructive feedback in the future and will create a positive, trusting relationship with the brand.
Remember to manage expectations! Don’t over-promise and do explain why you may not be able to address some issues straight away.
The bottom line
We have already seen how successful brands are good at meeting a need that is obvious, real, and meaningful. Your Brand Promise may meet a need that is real and meaningful, but your Brand Experience is what makes you good at meeting it. The commercial implications of getting the brand experience right are fundamental to the health of your brand. There is a double jeopardy that makes it too important to ignore. Get it wrong and you will be constantly investing in topping up a leaky bucket. Get it right and your brand will thrive through a continual upward spiral of feedback, improvement, and growth.
Coming next
Look out for the next instalment in this series where we will be examining how critical Brand Identity is to the future of success of your brand.
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