Connecting With Your Customer
BRAND EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Your friends told you about a new widget that they thought might interest you. You saw a magazine article that raved about the widget, and read two blog posts that also had good things to say. You searched the web and found high customer ratings and positive reviews from those who had bought and used the widget. So you surf to the company’s website and try to buy your new widget. But you can’t.
The home page has a five-minute movie that you can’t skip through. So you wait while it “entertains” you with 3-D flythroughs and thumping house music. Finally, you get through to the actual store, but you can’t find the widget you want because the navigation doesn’t make any sense. You search for it, but the search results are indecipherable. After clicking around for five minutes, you eventually stumble across the widget, but not the right color.
Another three minutes and you’ve figured out how to get the right color, so you add it to your shopping cart. Your smile quickly vanishes as you discover that you must create a customer account with what seems to be a lot of personal information. You have to sign up for a newsletter, product updates and third-party communications, and you can’t find any privacy policy that tells you how to opt out of these messages.
Increasingly uncomfortable, you continue on to the checkout process only to find that you can’t ship the widget to your p. o. box and the only shipping method available is U. S. mail. The coupon code you received from the company doesn’t work. You enter your credit card number with trepidation because you still don’t know what the final charge will be. You press the “purchase” button … and the website crashes.
Too often, a great product fails because at least one of the customer touchpoints along brand experience lifecycle is so flawed that buyers turn away rather than finishing the purchase process. Or they never reach the purchasing step because the marketing, advertising or sales touchpoints have annoyed or confused them to the point of looking for alternatives. Even worse, a good product can be sold effectively but supported and serviced so poorly that the customer returns the product and tells everyone they know about how badly the brand treated them.
Great brand experience design (BXD) is absolutely critical for the success of every business. More than ever, today’s customers are short on time, attention span and patience. The messages and tools that you give your target market to learn about your product, find it, buy it, receive it, use it and have it supported must all be designed to provide your customers with easy, enjoyable and efficient experiences. Additionally, those messages must be consistent and coherent with an well-crafted brand strategy that is customer-focused, empathetic and unique. Only then can you begin to build a brand that generates sales, customer loyalty, repeat sales, evangelism and referred sales. Learn more in the BXD blog.
Brand experiences, when designed intelligently and effectively, generate a positive vibe with your customer.
I’ve been designing great brand experiences for over twenty years, for clients such as Toyota, 3M, Walmart, Hyatt, Sprint, Philips, Alltel, Wabash College, On-Q Legrand, Dutko Worldwide and Applied Materials. These experiences have ranged from branding to advertising and promotional materials to e-commerce websites to in-store displays to product design and naming, and every experience was designed to align perfectly with the customer’s needs, desires and fantasies and result in dramatically increased brand affinity. Learn more in the Case Studies blog.
The VIBE process revolves around engaging customers to help design their own brand experiences. We will utilize intelligent research, collaboration and problem solving methodologies and tools to ask the right questions of the right people and use the answers to discover what they’re really thinking and feeling. We will carefully review the motivators, influences and rationale behind your target market’s behavior. The process seems simple, but the magic comes from our unique toolset, knowledge and skills to synthesize all of this information and create great experience design. Learn more about the VIBE process.
I’d love help you connect with your customer and start designing great brand experiences. Give me a call and let’s get started.