Your brand is the story you tell to engage and motivate people (prospects, customers, and employees) to believe in you, support you, and share the story. The story is formed by your advertising and is delivered through all your interactions – products, services, website, apps, policies, and your employees.
— Ed Murphy, Co-founder & President, ImprintCX
There is a symbiotic relationship between brand experience and customer experience (CX) — neither can be successful without the other. Not understanding this symbiotic relationship is a crucial reason companies struggle to be customer-centric.
Unfortunately, in most organizations, brand and customer experience are often siloed. According to a 2021 Qualtrics study, only 28% of marketing, brand, and CX leaders have processes allowing their brand strategy to feed into CX design and delivery. This disconnect is problematic, as customers do not differentiate between the brand promise and the customer experience; to them, it is the same.
Marketing and CX teams have similar responsibilities and goals – to attract and retain customers. These teams also have complementary expertise and data that should be leveraged holistically to create customer-centric experiences that deliver business results.
You can never truly be customer-centric if you focus on customer experience without a well-defined brand promise that your customers and employees believe in. Aligning your customer experience with your brand promise leads to customer advocacy and competitive advantage. (You also need to include employee experience,
but we will leave that for another time.)
Your brand experience is a promise to your customers. It should engage and motivate them to take action. Your customers expect the promise to be delivered consistently at EVERY interaction. The promise is the foundation of your customer experience blueprint. It must inspire, engage, and motivate employees to deliver the promise at EVERY customer interaction. If the experiences you deliver consistently align with the promises and expectations built by the brand’s marketing activity, the experience will create lasting memories that drive customer loyalty.
Your brand is your greatest asset; it is the public face of your company, and the experience you deliver is your voice – what are you saying?
Remember, a brand is not what you say it is; your true brand identity is what people believe you are based on your promise, their personal experiences, and what others say based on their experiences.
Your brand identity is your personality; that is what you are known for. It is the general impression you leave on people and the recognizable brand attributes that you make distinguishable from competitors.
Conclusion
The simplest way to summarize brand and customer experience is “promise.” Brand experience is about making the promise, and customer experience is about keeping the promise. Your brand experience informs the customer experience by providing a blueprint to engage and motivate employees to be customer-focused.
ImprintCX understands the keys to successful CX programs and can support you along the way. We have a proven CX framework to develop the foundations for sustained customer-centricity. Let’s get started.
