FOUR
Brand Intention
A brand without trust is a name without value.
Myriad factors separate market leaders from their competition, yet the one that matters most is the reason why their customers chose them. Whether in a business-to-consumer or business-to-business relationship, customer motivation is key to understanding how and why customers buy. It is also at the core of the definition of brand intention.
A business's mission, purpose, or passion can be described in many ways, yet brand intention goes further in defining the actual customer experience. It applies the concepts of market differentiation, competitive advantage, and value proposition and applies to the actual customer experience. Each of these makes promise that customers can easily identify with and understand. When your actions reflect the promise, customers come to trust it. This is how customers experience your true intention. Trust is all about keeping your promise. Brand intention goes beyond a statement of promise; it is the thoughtful and deliberate delivery, through a product or service, of your promise.
It is the moment when the statements of promise manifest as trust in the brand and reinforce the alignment between what is sold and what is bought. By taking actions that actively live up to that promise, you show your true intention. Great brands deliver their brand intention at extraordinary levels. The result is the customer feels he is getting what he paid for. The challenge is to clearly communicate the promise and to deliver it in a manner that creates trust.
The same is true of the customer experience. Often, we define customer experience without fully understanding it, which is why companies become misaligned with their customers's expectations. Companies must explore the full scope of that experience to understand how to deliver to it. Saying, “we deliver exceptional customer service,” “we provide superior customer satisfaction,” or “we meet and exceed our customer's expectations” is not enough. To communicate and align a company's brand intention successfully requires understanding what the customer's intended experience is and aligning everyone's actions, regardless of their role, to achieve it.
THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
We can see the successful delivery of brand intention in virtually every aspect of the customer experience (see Figure 4.1). Responding to the brand intention the customer chooses to spend money on a product or service and the transaction takes place. The transaction is the process of buying and receiving the product or service for which the customer is paying. Often, definitions of a transaction focus on the exchange of payment. This is limiting. A transaction is the total customer experience.
Suppose I'm shopping for a new stove. I can do this in one of three ways. I can visit the local appliance dealer. The one near my home is still owned by its founder, who is dedicated to building a family business. His son has grown up in the shop and will eventually take the leadership role from his father. To be competitive, the store offers high-end quality products, expertise, and a promise that, because it is a local family business, there is a greater degree of attention and caring than in the big box stores.
The second option is to visit one or more of the nearby home improvement, hardware, or appliance centers, where I'll have a host of similar brands to choose from, and which are probably not those available from my local dealer—at competitive prices. At the store level, they will likely offer similar levels of expertise and service.
I can also go online and look at various styles, models, and manufacturers, and compare prices. Of course, other considerations will affect my decision-making process, including delivery time, the cost of delivery, whether the dealer will connect the stove, the expertise the employees, and how the dealer will dispose of my current unit.
Figure 4.1 Brand Intention and Trust
Thus, the transaction has multiple parts. There will be distinct differences in how it will take place depending on where I purchase it and what my expectations are from the various brands. It's not simply choosing a stove and learning the cost. The transaction includes all aspects of my experience: how I am treated by the employees I interact with; the amount of attention I receive; how well I feel employees listened; the level of competency of the salesperson involved (assuming I don't just order online); the timeliness and overall experience of the delivery and installation; the level of openness I experience from the company's representatives; the level of communication, and so on.
A customer typically experiences one of two emotional outcomes from a transaction. The first is satisfaction, resulting in happiness, excitement, joy, contentment, and a general sense of well-being—what is being paid for is being delivered. The second is dissatisfaction, resulting in disappointment, anger, blame, and resentment—not getting what is being paid for.
In reviewing my three options, you might conclude that you get what you pay for. Pay less, and therefore expect less. Pay more, and therefore expect more. When you get what you pay for, you're happy; when you don't, you're angry. It's always about our emotions. Meaning is the association of our values and beliefs with our experience and emotion. Meaning is our interpretation of our emotions and helps us understand the reasons behind our feelings. In interactions with people, it is how we describe our intentions toward one another. As customers, we want salespeople to pay attention to us, as this satisfies our need to feel important. We want a product or service competently delivered because it reflects on our competence as a customer; it means I made a great decision. We want to feel cared for and well treated. If you are open and honest with me, it's because you care about me and have nothing to hide.
If I decide to purchase a low-price model to fit my basic needs from a home improvement center, I will have a different experience than if I purchase it from a small store. As I look at the models on display, I expect that eventually someone will ask if I need assistance. As a result, I will have a positive emotional response. The salesperson's attention signals that I am important. If I have to find someone to assist me or if I find the salesperson is unhelpful, I'll feel ignored and frustrated. This will lead to a negative emotional response.
If I ask a salesperson to help me determine the best deal among the lower priced models, and the salesperson helps me find the most stove for my money, I will feel more competent. I will know that I came to the right place and got the best deal. If he is unable to help me, I may feel he is incompetent. In turn, I may feel incompetent for choosing the wrong place. Or, I can blame his incompetence, vent my anger, and convince myself that I did not make a poor choice; the salesperson simply didn't know what he was doing.
What if I tell a salesperson what I'm looking for, and he doesn't listen, steering me toward a higher priced product, all the while sharing how much he knows about it? While I'm not impressed by his listening skills, I may think he's well informed. Yet, because he hasn't responded to my desire, I question whether he is open to my needs or cares about me. If I choose to shop locally, I expect a very knowledgeable salesperson will give me personal attention, will have in-depth knowledge of each product, and will also explore my price range, my cooking habits, and so on to help me find the best stove for my needs. If I decide to buy from him, I expect to receive the same level of expertise and service from the employees who deliver and install it. While I may expect to pay more, the added value—additional attention and caring, as well as the higher level of competency and expertise—might be worth it.
Regardless of the route I take, each option has a set of customer expectations and service criteria connected to it. If my expectations are met, I will be satisfied and happy. If any expectation goes unmet, I will be disappointed. If more than one goes unmet, my negative emotion may escalate and result in feelings of frustration, annoyance, or anger. As customers, the more positive our emotion, the greater our trust. Our interpretation of how well our needs are met gives our experience meaning and is frequently at the center of the story we tell about that experience.
Trust is critical to a mutually beneficial relationship between the provider and the customer. It measures the mutual respect the customer feels when the provider delivers on the promise represented by the product or service and the brand intention. Mutual respect is at the core of that relationship. Trust is the most powerful aspect of brand intention and the key to retaining customers and attracting new ones. It reinforces the value and loyalty associated with a brand and is the major influence over what customers are willing to pay for.
Brand intention defines your promise to your customer. Great brands convey believability and trust and invite the customer to experience what the company is strategically endeavoring to deliver. To do this successfully, a company's market strategy must align with the customer's experience. Since the 1980s, we've relied on a fairly consistent set of similar looking approaches—value proposition, market differentiator, the value-add, and competitive advantage—to interpret and define what the customer wants and then to articulate and connect it to strategy. What started over a century ago as a three-legged stool, representing the three root strategies of quality, service, and price, has evolved into a host of strategies. Low price evolved into the market and organizational strategies of low cost, which resulted in organizational excellence, operational efficiency, and other cost reduction strategies, including those associated with lean manufacturing. Internally, they were aimed at reducing the cost of creating and delivering a product or service to the customer and often supported the goal of winning the customer through competitive pricing.
The art of winning the customer through service matured into more definitive approaches to describing the customer relationship. More advanced service strategies now include the approaches of customer intimacy, customer synergy, and partnering. Over time, quality evolved into such approaches as product or service superiority, uniqueness, and innovation.
Many of these approaches continue to evolve, serve businesses well, and help define what customers buy, yet they often fail to focus on the customer and do not fully recognize or value what a buyer wants. They are often provider focused rather than customer focused or customer centric. This overall trend is unfortunate. Although these approaches may at times have served business well, they do not provide a complete understanding of what motivates today's customers to buy.
Over the past two decades, the strategic and brand thinking we've relied on has become outdated. A primary reason is the multitude of options offered. Just think of the “better, better, better” and “new and improved” sales pitches that bombard us and the increasing number of options and product features we have to sort through. The overload this creates may leave you questioning the value of what you buy and wishing for simplicity. Psychologically and emotionally, the decisions we feel forced to make are not only confusing they also cause anxiety and stress. They leave us wondering whether we trust that what we get is worth what we're paying for it.
Over time, we've also taken what were once direct marketing and advertising messages and expanded, mixed, and adulterated them to the point where they are no longer connected to the reason why they once worked—human nature. Second, much of the focus on market strategy has been directed inward. In an effort to become more strategic, companies have concentrated more of their efforts on internal processes and systems than on the actual delivery to the customer. Increasing competition and the desire for cost effectiveness has led many companies to pursue goals and objectives that are disconnected from the customer. Furthermore the misalignment of people's day-to-day tasks and activities and the performance goals they support results in a lack of engagement.
One aspect of great strategic thinking that creates higher levels of engagement and success is how well the strategies connect to the what, why, and how a company delivers to its customer. Whether the strategy pertains to product or service development, market development, operational capability, financial management, or human resources, by definition it must support the intentional delivery of the promise made to the customer.
A third reason the long-standing approaches to market strategy are not as effective as they once were can easily be overlooked. It is the confusion that results from thinking that technology, in and of itself, is a brand strategy. Brand loyalty occurs when a person feels an emotional bond to the brand. The human aspect of how a customer experiences the product or service personalizes the brand. The multitude of communication technologies available and the immense power of social media make it more difficult to make these connections.
Social media provide a means to communicate more efficiently with larger numbers of people than ever before, yet a wide reach doesn't typically result in the deep experience that defines our more meaningful connections. Having 1,000 friends on Facebook is not the same as having a few friends with whom you have an intimate and trusting relationship. The same is true of a brand. Unless I am able to consistently convey my intention and deliver it to the customer, my brand has little value no matter how many people know about it.
Companies large and small must continue to evolve their approaches and not rely on past success. The marketplace demands that companies and organizations move forward and think about market strategies and branding in ways that more accurately and powerfully reflect and respond to today's customer. In today's marketplace, winning requires a never-ending dedication to the alignment of a company's brand intention to its customer. In Chapter Five, we'll examine the six brand intentions and how they are evident in many of today's market-leading brands, how they align to the three customer motivations, and how you are affected by them.