BlogSirpa Toljander 07.06.2024

Which marketing management should invest in right now – customer experience or brand?

Brand development Brand Customer experience Customer insight

Customer experience is always created, whether you manage it or not. Excellent customer experience boosts the brand, poor spoils it. But even the best customer experience is not enough if the brand is not strong enough to bring the experience to the right address. In the following, Dagmar’s Customer Experience Strategist Sirpa Toljander discusses the symbiosis between brand and customer experience and the distribution of investments.

What is a good customer experience? One that lives up to customer expectations. But what do customer expectations consist of?

The brand has a huge impact on customer expectations. While a brand is the image that people have of a company, its products and services, customer experience is a holistic view of how, where and how a brand interacts with its customers.

With price, service and product, it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out. Therefore, emotion has emerged as a factor with which a brand can produce a distinctive customer experience.

Customer experience or brand first?

In customer experience management, customer expectations management is at the heart of everything, as customer experience is always somewhere between customer expectations and customer promises. A good customer experience leads to customer satisfaction, customer testimonials and customer loyalty. These have a direct impact on business growth and profitability.

Customer expectations are shaped by recommendations or barks from different reference groups, brand images, advertising and user experience. A consistent and consistent customer experience requires a brand that stands out from competitors and is remembered so that a good customer experience arrives at the right address and shapes customer behavior in the desired direction.

Which should you invest in, brand or customer experience? The answer is easy! Both. The combination of the two produces the best results. The most successful brand platforms are those that stand the test of time and repetition. Customer experience, on the other hand, is built over time at different touch points, which include all direct and indirect interactions between the customer and the brand.

“When the starting point for brand management and brand building is customer understanding, we make sure that the customer experience and the brand go hand in hand. At the end of the day, the brand lives only as an image in the minds of customers, so if the customer experience is poor, it will also negatively affect the brand.“, says Jukka Ihalainen, Creative Strategy Director in Dagmar.

Excellent customer experience as a brand boost, poor as a death blow

At its best, an excellent customer experience can increase the willingness to recommend. If customers receive great service from a brand at every possible touchpoint, it will gradually become a significant part of the brand, a great example of which is Apple. Apple’s customer loyalty is the strongest in its industry, and no wonder.

Steve Jobs summed it up this way: “You’ve got to start with Customer Experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” Apple’s product development is customer-centric, product design is simple and innovative, the brand is unique, visiting an Apple Store is an experience. Apple products speak for themselves, sell themselves and create customer loyalty, the brand is especially loved, and advertising is simple. At Apple, customer experience is at the heart of everything and comes first—a winning differentiation strategy and way of working.

73% of global consumers say that a good customer experience is key to brand loyalty. Loyal customers are five times more likely to buy again and four times more likely to recommend the brand to their friends – computationally, sales can be increased up to 3.5x with customer recommendations.

A bad customer experience can ruin a brand. According to studies, 32% of consumers who love a brand can turn their backs on a brand even after one bad customer experience.

Symbiosis of brand and customer experience

Customer understanding enables the systematic development of the brand and customer experience. A customer experience strategy based on customer understanding orchestrates a consistent and consistent customer experience that strengthens the brand in every encounter along the customer journey.

From the perspective of mental accessibility, brands should strive to increase the number of contexts associated with the brand. High mental availability enables brand growth. As the media landscape becomes fragmented and consumer attention is widely distributed, it is important to invest in impactful encounters.

The customer experience is built on the company’s unique culture and way of meeting the customer. It includes emotions, reactions, and thoughts that arise directly from consuming, buying, and using a branded product or service. Their community orchestration builds a unique customer experience strategy that creates competitive advantage – a differentiation strategy that has an impact on companies’ profitability and growth. A recognizable and distinctive brand, on the other hand, ensures that all customer journey experiences are delivered to the right address, steer customer behavior in the desired direction and influence business indicators.

Let’s talk more about customer experience and brand!

AUTHOR

Sirpa Toljander

CX Director

sirpa.toljander@dagmar.fi

+358456450616

Sirpa is Dagmar’s Customer Experience Director, who advocates for engaging, insightful, and sharp content that involves the target group, and gets excited about the use of agile processes and operating models in all marketing activities.

Sources:

Customer experience is everything: PwC
Forbes
Deloitte