A special thanks to Chris Baradel and Linda Rondinelli for their help in applying all the principles contained therein to get this book into your hands. One of the most powerful distinctions I brought to light in that book was the fact that marketing isn't an art—it's a science.
ENTERPRISE
MARKETING MANAGEMENT
From the smallest local company to vast global corporations, this is the end of the art of marketing and the beginning of the new science of marketing. Gone are the esoteric theories of marketing as a creatively driven enterprise. And you will undoubtedly sell more, because in the end that is exactly what every marketer wants.
MARKETING IS NOT AN ART—
IT IS A SCIENCE
Brand experience addresses all aspects of how your company interacts with your customer, including downstream, post-purchase interactions about how to use or service what you sell. Next, you need to translate that value proposition framework—the brand architecture—into specific actions across the entire brand experience.
ARCHITECT YOUR BRAND
You can determine the structure of a brand architecture by focusing on the key purchase intent drivers—the attributes or benefits that influence customers' overall decisions to buy or use a product. This is the high ground not yet taken—and the turf you must strive to conquer.
PLUG MARKETING INTO THE ENTERPRISE
It is crucial that marketing is connected to the flow of information from all areas of the company. In addition, each representative must know all of the company's interactions with each customer. The real shame is that marketing and HR rarely meet in the company's best interests.
The company realized that it had to understand the specific needs of customers and incorporate them into the messages that American Express sent. The company has spent considerable money, time and resources training salespeople to sell based on customer needs. The company is now in the process of expanding the app to create a more comprehensive view of the customer relationship. The plan captures all the elements a salesperson uses throughout the sales cycle—value information, customer testimonials, and survey findings—and loads them into a central knowledge database.
Marketing can now curate content and deploy new posts quickly. The continuous feedback loop allows the sales team to let marketing and other reps know what's working and what's not. Sales Force Online has provided American Express with a wealth of information, so much so that account managers seek access to the same information. The company is now expanding the application to provide a more holistic view of the customer relationship.
TAKE OWNERSHIP
OF THE BRAND EXPERIENCE
Rising from the customer, the next element of the brand experience is the customer touchpoints. The other element of the brand experience is the traditional media that most marketers are already very comfortable with (print ads, TV ads, promotions). The primary channel represents the dominant means of serving your customer across all elements of the brand experience.
In what ways might a marketer consider adding value to the brand experience in the evaluate options (suggest options) stage. In what ways can a marketer consider adding value to the brand experience at the buying (selling) stage. In what ways might a marketer consider adding value to the brand experience in the use (educate) stage.
What are some ways a marketer might consider adding value to the brand experience during the buy-in phase (providing support). Assessing the situation requires first identifying the relevant steps of the brand experience to focus on.
PLUG MARKETING INTO CRM
Interestingly enough, looking at the constituent letters of the acronym itself can reveal some flaws in customer relationship management thinking. One of the nice results of implementing CRM across your enterprise is that you get a huge amount of data about your customers. In recent months, she has noticed a sharp drop in the purchase of toner cartridges from one of the regional wholesalers of office supplies.
Even if you are lucky enough to uncover a customer insight, if the data is not timely, it may be too late to seize the opportunity. The biggest concern is the fact that you may not be in control of the dialogue about your brands. In extreme cases, marketing and the side of creating customer demand is completely ignored.
Furthermore, if marketing and the voice of the customer are excluded from the process, there will be a tendency for the focus of the CRM initiative to shift inwards. The concept of brand experience builds a bridge between marketing's traditional domain in the marketing mix and the new focus on customer relationship management.
CROSS-MARKET TO CROSS-SELL
On a broader scale, enterprise marketing management drives the most ambitious and successful cross-marketing efforts. For example, the redesign of marketing processes, the management of increasingly complex marketing channels, is at the heart of cross-marketing efforts. By comparison, Wells Fargo has 3.8 relationships and plans to grow that number to 8.0 through aggressive cross-marketing efforts.
Cross-marketing doesn't work if you don't have customers willing to pay attention to your offers, and Wells Fargo works to deliver outstanding sales and service to every customer, providing advice and guidance as a prelude to cross-selling .Wells Fargo bases its cross-marketing efforts on the individual customer's situation and specific needs, wants and motivations. Considering its customers' life stages, financial resources and changing needs, Wells Fargo organizes its cross-marketing programs based on the way different customers buy and use financial service products. Base cross-marketing efforts on the individual customer's situation and specific wants, needs, motivations and purchasing opportunities.
Organize your cross-marketing programs based on the way different customers buy and use your products and services. The most important principle to remember about cross-marketing is that it's all about branding and the relationships your customers form with your brand.
USE NEW MEDIA FOR BRAND ACTIVATION
The brand experience blueprint must consider new media when planning for specific customer outcomes. New media represents an ideal vehicle to reach out, economically and electronically, and deliver your brand benefits to ensure you are marketing correctly at every stage of the brand experience. They still remain far from the vanguard when it comes to the use of new media.
Companies that want to make the most of new media must integrate it into literally every element of the marketing mix. Alternatively, it can be just as important to use new media to keep customers engaged with your business. Instead, they need to think about how new media can be the secret weapon that allows them to manage and take ownership of the brand experience.
M&M's serves as an excellent example to emulate when considering how to leverage new media to sell more products. The beauty of new media is that the effectiveness of a campaign like M&M's Global Vote Count is easily measurable.
RESTRUCTURE BASED ON BRAND EXPERIENCE
The brand architecture identifies the individual parts of the brand to determine its contribution to customer value creation. To take full advantage of a compelling brand positioning, all of the brand's activities must focus on the fundamental marketing objective of increasing profitability. Measures are critical to making decisions about the investment of the company's scarce resources in order to maximize profitability and deliver on the brand promise.
By mapping elements of the brand architecture to key customer touchpoints, Intouch CellCo found that there are 10 critical business functions that directly impact the brand experience (see Figure 8.8). To uncover these elements and help each function bring the brand to life at key customer touchpoints, Intouch CellCo has developed specific business models for each function. The goal is to map the key strengths of your brand architecture—the aspects you know motivate purchase intent—to each of the stages of the brand experience.
Create cross-functional teams to design the business model from the customer's perspective. Use the brand experience blueprint as a guideline. Capturing the customer data and insights needed to activate the brand experience (e.g. current provider, segment profile, usage profile).
MEASURE INVESTMENT PERFORMANCE
Again, this assumes that the lifetime value of the customer exceeds your cost of acquiring the customer (acquisition cost). If your business thinking falls on the left side of the table, you need to move to the right. Your marketing department utilizes the elements of the marketing mix to target these consumers and drive sales of your product.
It is the same when targeting firm profitability: a company is much more effective when all functions operate in sync. Therefore, all employees have a special interest and responsibility to contribute to the profitability of the firm and all must work in sync to achieve this profitability. Using ROMI analysis enables the firm to ensure that the money invested in business marketing activities generates a sufficient return.
It invests in the manufacturing of the product, making tradeoffs in manufacturing that result in a high quality product or a high value product. So if the rest of the company is measuring success on ROMI, then marketing should talk about their work in terms of ROMI.
