Brand Vs Customer Experience: Lessons from The MSK Gala 2017

Brand Vs customer experience was the main theme at this year’s MSK Gala (2017) as hundreds of marketers assembled at the Arboretum to honour the brands that chose to invest in delivering their brand promise through delightful customer experiences.

As you read this, hopefully, your clients and customers are readings your company tweets, liking your Facebook page and sharing your company’s Linkedin updates. But one question to ponder is whether your brand is poised to deliver what your tweets and website copy promise.

According to a global study of more than 2,000 marketing decision makers and consumers, the disconnect between brands and customer experience is most significant today with 82% of marketers believing that they have a deep understanding of their target market, while only 23% of consumers think the same. For example, did you know that the top two channels which consumers prefer to connect with a brand are websites and emails?

As marketers, how did we get here?

Some Background:

Remember what it was like to shop for shoes 25 years ago?

Back then, you had to walk into a real store and talk to real people about the shoes you want and whether they are available. Sure, the customer service was not always the best, but your experience as a customer always involved genuine face to face interaction with the brand. Simply put, “what you saw is what you got.”

Fast forward to 2017

We have the internet, smartphones and social media, all making it possible to buy a pair of shoes at the simple click of a button. However, now that consumers have unlimited points of engaging with your brand, they now expect you to provide valuable connection at each and every point.  If you are not careful about your brand experience, chances are there might be a disconnect between the story you are telling and the ultimate customer experience.

Brand vs Customer experience Legibra MSK 2017

As we mingled and exchanged ideas with other marketers at the Gala, it was evident that bridging the gap between marketing and brand experience all comes down to the choices we make as brands. Choices like:

• Acknowledging the importance of customer experience by creating a strategy to address successful engagement and ensuring a strategic alignment with executive leadership.
• Empowering marketers with the right tools and technology to ensure effective engagement.

But once you have made the choice to bridge the gap between your marketing and the customer experience, how exactly do you go about it? Here are some pointers.

Brand Vs Customer Experience; How To Bridge The Gap

1. Start with the B (brand)

What is the fundamental story of your brand or product? Notice that companies like Safaricom who have a story always know what their brand stands for regardless of explicit messaging

    2. Next, Brand Experience

When you look at your website, sponsored posts, blog articles, email newsletters and even posters, can you spot an element of consistency? Once your brand is established, the next obvious step is to communicate the brand via various channels, and all this communication when wrapped up creates the brand experience.

  3. Customer experience

As the name suggests, customer experience is a subset of brand experience and defines the perceptions of those already aware of your brand. The best measurement of customer experience is whether, after an interaction with your brand, the customer would recommend you to a friend.

 4. Finally Comes Marketing

Marketing or marketing activations are where people determine the placement of brand and customer experiences to ensure that they are visible. Marketing depends on the steps above so that the marketing team is clear about what it is they are activating.

Fortunately, there are already some brands that understand this hierarchy and have implemented it to deliver seamless consumer experiences. These are the customer heroes that went on to receive awards at the MSK Gala 2017. We congratulate you once more!!

MSK GALA 2017 Winners

Brand vs Customer Experience in 2018 

There’s still much work to be done to deliver the experiences that consumers expect today. And even though for most brands the customer journey is highly fractured across websites, social media channels, mobile apps and even brick-and-mortar property; we call upon marketers to steward the delivery of more authentic and personalized engagement to customers at the scale required today.