Life is all about change. And business life is no different. In the beginning we had CRM which was all about extracting profits by managing customers. As business got smarter, it came to relaise that customers expected something more in return for their hard-earned cash. They expected decent products, at fair prices and the heart of the matter, they expected support over the end-to-end ownership experience. So Customer Experience Management (CEM) was born. And almost inevitably, a whole host of business books about CEM too.
Read through the books on CEM and you will find two different camps. The first, populated mostly by branding types, says that the customer experience should allow customers to experience the brand. That the brand comes first and that the customer experience should revolve around it. The other, populated by customer service and consulting types, says that the experience should be continuously improved so that it becomes a real brand in its own right. A brand fit for real customers. That the customer comes first and the customer experience should revolve around them.
Which one is the best approach? Experiencing the Brand? Or Branding the Experience?
To answer that question, let's step back to look at what a brand actually is. Contrary to the opinion of the mighty marketing industry, a brand is not a company's marketing communications. They may help create category need, awareness, even interest in a product, but that is not the same as a brand. The iconic marketer Tom Asacker [1] has what is perhaps the best definition of a brand in his book A Clear Eye for Branding [2]. He says [3], that a brand is "an expectation of something or someone delivering a certain feeling by way of an experience". In other words, brands are the results of experiences that you have. They exist primarily in the hearts and minds of customers. Not in the communications of marketers. This is what CEM is really all about. The customer experience is the brand. The real brand. The one that evokes strong feelings in the customer. The brand is not the experience.
Some marketers have finally got the message. People like P&G's CEO AG Lafley who stunned the October 2006 meeting of the Association of National Advertisers by imploring marketers to Just Let Go [4] of brands and let customers take charge. This was quickly followed by Time Magazine [5] declaring YOU, the customer as person of the year and by Advertising Age [6] declaring the Consumer as agency of the year. If P&G, Time Magazine and Advertising Age recognise that the customer is in charge and that their experience with their products is the brand, isn’t it time that you did too?
What do you think? Should you experience the brand? Or should you brand the real experience?
Post a comment and get the conversation going.
Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager
PS. Here are the best books on CEM and the consultancies that sit behind them These are the ones I use in my own CEM consulting and interim work with clients:
Bernd Schmitt
1. Experiential Marketing
2. Customer Experience Management
The Ex Group [7]
Colin Shaw
1. Building Great Customer Experiences
2. Revolutionise Youe Customer Experience
3. The DNA of Customer Experience
Beyond Philosophy [8]
Lou Carbone
Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again
Experience Engineering [9]
Carbone also works with IBM too.
Shaun Smith & Joe Wheeler
1. Uncommon Practice
2. Managing the Customer Experience
3. See. Feel. Think. Do.
(Smith) Shaun Smith + Co [10]
(Wheeler) The Forum Corporation [11]
Michael Dunn
Building the Brand-Driven Business
Prophet [12]
There are other, newer books too, but they either just repeat the same stuff less well, or are simply confused. These books are by far and away the best.