The vital importance of linking brand and customer experience to deliver growth

Why should brands and brand marketers care about customer experience? And why should the brand and marketing team collaborate closely with the CX team?

Simply, because you’ll almost certainly be more successful if you do so.

At Kantar we recently used our huge BrandZ database to analyse 10,000 brands over a 2-year time period, and found those who improved most in their experience delivery to customers were 2.5x more likely to significantly grow their market share over 2 years.

And further, there’s an assumption that building a strong brand is only something that marketing and media can influence. This is far from the case. Our analysis shows that 25% of the impact comes from paid media whereas 75% impact comes from other touchpoints including experience.  

We think stats like this are important as they start to make the case for the vital role of CX in measures that CEOs and the c-suite care about.

Therefore, it’s crucial to get brand and CX to work together.

This is why CX is an integral part of our recently launched Blueprint for Brand Growth, which tells us that brands grow by being meaningfully different to more people. Once they build a meaningfully different brand, successful brands work to predispose more people to buy and to pay more through their exposures and experiences. They also ensure they’re present and activating effectively wherever customers are. And once they’ve mastered the earlier parts, they look for new space to grow into.

Customer experience is part of the ‘Predispose More People’ growth driver, with a virtual loop between the brand promise, which sets expectations that are met, or not, in actual lived experiences; and actual experiences which shape brand perceptions that may or may not live up to the brand promise.

So brand and CX are linked, in both directions, through this ‘framing and feeding’ dynamic.

Designing a meaningfully different customer experience

When it comes to CX, if you just follow what the research and the UX testing tells you about how to create a good customer journey, you’ll create a good, efficient, frictionless one that meets basic functional category needs – but one that is most likely the same as your competitors, and not memorable. Don’t get us wrong, this is still a great point to reach and hard to do well consistently, both across channels and over time. But it won’t differentiate you.

Truly excelling, and getting the maximum business impact, means you also need a signature difference for your brand only, what we at Kantar call meaningfully different experiences.

What do we mean by that? A ‘meaningful’ brand builds a clear and consistent emotional connection with consumers and is seen to deliver against their needs. The power of ‘difference’ reveals the extent to which some brands are seen to lead the way and offer something that others don’t.

Logically therefore, you need to define a clear perspective on which parts of your CX are fine to be just like everyone else, and those that can differentiate your brand – whether delighting via superior functional performance, having an emotive pay off, or delivering an experience that customers say could only come from your brand.

By defining a signature experience that is distinctive to your brand, you will go the extra mile. Offering ‘meaningfully different’ CX will help supercharge your business performance and make your brand more resilient, which is especially important in the current difficult market context.

And we have a framework to help guide your path to meaningfully different experiences – get in touch to find out more.