Aligning your brand and customer experience means making sure every interaction delivers on the promises your marketing makes. Your brand is a beacon, not just a logo, and disconnects between marketing and the rest of the organization create an off-brand experience. Kerry Bodine offers three practical steps: see where your brand shows up in the experience, help employees own their role, and align marketing with reality.
Your brand is more than a logo and a set of visual design guidelines. It's a beacon that should set the tone for every internal decision and every external interaction. But systemic disconnects between your marketing department and the rest of your organization can result in confusion over what your brand stands for — and an off-brand customer experience that fails to deliver on your brand promise.
If you want to pull your brand and your CX into alignment, follow these relatively simple steps:
1. Determine how your brand is reflected (or not) in your customer experience
Your company makes explicit promises to your customers through marketing communications and advertising. You also make implicit promises through visual design, tone, and other brand elements. Which customer interactions express the full potential of your brand promises? Which ones contradict your brand promises?
2. Help your employees determine their own role in delivering an on-brand CX
How might your employees be unintentionally derailing your brand through their day-to-day actions and decisions? How do behind-the-scenes staff support (or thwart) employees who interact directly with customers? By helping your employees to understand your brand and discover these answers for themselves, you'll empower them and secure their buy-in for change.
3. Align your marketing with your actual customer experience
Work to improve those customer interactions that don't live up to your existing brand promises while simultaneously crafting new promises. Use journey maps to highlight the bright spots in your customer experience — and then create messaging that communicates those bright spots to customers. Over time, you'll be able to showcase larger and larger swaths of your customer experience.
I've developed a set of tools to help organizations start thinking about how their brand and CX are interconnected. Get the free download! It's just a prototype at this stage — so please send me your feedback if you have any ideas about how to improve it.