SAMPA CHAKARBARTY LAHIRI
---------------------------------------
SM Research Team

the small square Cartier watch with the black strap was the only jewellery she wore; it caught the gleam of the sun on her tanned wrist as the evening breeze played with her straight silky hair hued a rich chestnut with L’Oreal. She looked out at the world through her light-coloured Bausch & Lomb contact lens and walked away briskly leaving behind a stab of Samara in the air...There are moments when a brush with brands can make your heart skip a beat or two
Humming beneath the breath the tune of Virginia Slims ad jingle “You’ve come a long way baby”, millions of women, who had never tried cigarettes before, took to smoking, and savoured the heady zing of liberty...While the pop, the fizz and the tangy flavour soothed millions of parched souls since the 1890s and its flaming scarlet painted the planet red, Coke acquainted the masses to the unique swoosh of effervescence...Thus, born in the corporate boardrooms was brand’s market experiences. They kindle latent desires, stimulate unfelt needs, instil new ideas and attitudes and delineate new perceptions of life.
A brand is a promise to consumers that they can rely on them to guide their choices. Apart from weaving the right experience around the brands with visceral appeal - for instance, perfumes, beverages and cars - in a number of industries, the marketplace is witnessing the development of experience branding. Here, a company carefully orchestrates everything it does - in particular, its myriad contact points with the customer - in order to deliver a highly differentiated and consistent positive experience. In a sense, the brand is individual to each customer and is built on his or her cumulative experience of buying and using the company’s product and services. An instance of one such successful experience branding is British Airways which has now transformed itself from a mere transport business into a world-class service business run by professionals who understand what motivates an air-traveller. In the words of the BA chairman, Colin Marshall, the product is not simply a seat but an experience being orchestrated across the airline. That orchestration is the brand.

Brand experience as a key to the heart
With the market exhausted with proliferation of me-too brands; with the media infested with “copy-cat” or look-alike advertisements; with the manufacturers wrung dry with high rate of new product failures and short term price promotions that have led to a sharp reduction in profitability of brands; the market protagonists are now in look out of new ways to enhance loyalty or brand equity towards brands. Even a couple of years ago, for most companies, branding was all about positioning, advertising, packaging, catchy logos and slogans.
Today however, it is evident that lots of money and energy spent in these areas has simply gone down the drain. Branding in today’s marketplace is all about the experience a customer has with the product or service. It is about enticing customers, gaining their trust and making experience so peasant that they are proud of their choice and tell others about it. To survive the onslaught of time, researchers have identified five ways to the consumers’ heart through brand experience viz. self-expression, emotion, sole logical choice, virtual benefit, pride and values.

1. Self Expression
Consumers will prefer the brand if it expresses their (desired) character and identity, if an experience with it can tell a crisp and a precise story to the world about them. They want the encounter with the brand to define their identity and express it, to draw a complete picture of his character, personality and identity. Driving a Mercedes, for instance, has stood for opulence, prestige and efficiency for decades. Smoking a Marlboro has always promised to give one a cowboy-like feel of independence. Wearing a Baume & Mercier watch which has remained a craze for the rich and the famous since 1918 with a delicate balance between tradition and modernity. Disney, for instance, has always inspired masses down the generations to discover the child in oneself. (See Box: Discovering the child in you)
2. Emotion
To spin the right experience with the brand that can lead to a long lasting relationship, the brands can have an important emotional stance. Consumers will prefer the product or service because they will want to be with the brand. Just the way little girls crave for Barbie (See Box: Barbie at the haven-side). As the emotional alignment grows stronger, so does the brand. People love it. And they buy it. For example Orange - even though Orange delivers a tangible service, its message has always wandered away from the stereotype and is all about life. Loaded with emotion, an experience
with Orange’s brand message gives one a distinct feel that it is a brand with a beating heart, a brand that lives. Presenting De Beers to your loved ones is not only just about gifting somebody diamonds; it is about gifting your beloved with something as precious and as intangible as love.

3. Sole logical choice
The way we perceive things is the result of programs deeply ingrained in our minds. Consumers prefer the brand because perception and behaviour programs point to it as the only logical choice. To transform the brand in the consumer’s perception, an experience with the brands will have to catapult it into a higher league - leaving all the other “functional” competitive products and services way behind. They have to enhance their credibility and inspire trust in consumers. IBM, who stands by its promise of offering the masses “solutions for a small planet” and GE, which stands for its trustworthiness, intelligence and vow to “bring good things to life” illustrate the point well. The two companies communicate confidence. Consumers feel that if they buy these brands they will not go wrong. For a few years, when IBM forfeited its leadership of the computer industry, this perception may have seemed untrue. But it is a measure of the brand’s underlying strength that after a few years the company is again back on the top.

4. Virtual benefit
Consumers prefer the brand because an encounter with it offers a compelling (virtual) benefit. To shape a virtual edge over competitors, brand experiences can be linked to a mind-movie that projects those specific values that are relevant to the purchase decision.
With the unique flavour of its whipped frozen cream, savouring Haagen-Dazs, an American ice-cream with a Scandinavian name, reminds one of clean pure mountain air, crystal-clear ice and the virgin beauty of Scandinavia. With the purity and the flavour to match it, Amul, born in the villages of India, has established itself as “The taste of India” and the thought of a fast-melting dollop of Amul butter on a hot paratha simply cannot fail to stir the appetite of an Indian. With its sleek and elegant make, a Gucci pledges to give you a feeling that is truly Italian.

5. Pride and Values
Consumers prefer a brand when an experience with it resolves an inner conflict (with their norms and values). The brand experience can, for instance,
* Eliminate existing feelings of guilt
*Challenge - and satisfy - a consumer’s pride
* Neutralise taboos connected with your product
To appeal to the consumer’s sense of pride and values, some brands have challenged the pride of the consumers and have offered a unique experience with them as means of satisfying it. When Mercedes Benz decided to build its new M Class off-road vehicle it started by sending to a section of its prospective customers, a personally addressed letter from its head asking them to help the company design a brand new off-road car. This was followed by a series of questionnaires for guidance on design issues. Customers felt honoured with such an encounter with Mercedes. And the brand created history. Wearing Revlon’s Charlie, a fragrance designed for and marketed to the new women, a self-aware beauty feels more comfortable in the corporate boardrooms. By driving Harley Davidson, their users always aspired to mirror the cult of iconoclastic freedom. (See box: Harley Davidson: the flavour of freedom)

The touch factor
The orange flame of a sleek Dunhill lighter, small sips of Chivas Regal Scotch, notes of Calvin Klein’s Obsession that linger on between the folds of satin, MTV with the mantra of fast lives, fast cars, toe-tapping music, tattooed skin, shocking apparels and weird hairstyles, Disney with its vow to offer kid-like fun to people of all ages, McDonalds with its cosy ambience waiting to give ones family a treat (see box: McDonald’s: Always waiting for your family), Barista offering you a badge of class and elegance (See box: Barista invites you to coffee) brands are all about experiences. Some of the brand-associated stimuli like the brand image, the brand name (its spelling and pronunciation), the colour, shape and material used in its advertising and packaging, the verbal, thematic and visual signs of its advertisement, the tune of the ad jingle etc. touch us profoundly. The other allied factors like ambience, customer dealing, service quality and retail-store image, also make an impact to reckon with and have a long lasting impact on ones senses. At times, some of them are too weak to be perceived consciously yet are strong enough to be received by some of our sensitive receptor cells.
And these experiences, which are in the form of seeing, listening, tasting, smelling and feeling, and above all perceiving, touch the consumer, create an impression about the brand and remain stored in the memory for long. It is this touch factor that instils a deep feeling which gets imprinted in our minds, that makes an appeal to man’s senses, that is received as a stimulus by his sensory organ and that gets transmitted to his brain which again forms meaningful coherent pictures and interprets them. Thus, an association with a brand is, deep down, all about this very touch factor - the factor that forms the core of brand experience.

To know what they really think
Apart from the other traditional measures such as measuring the market share, the share of customer’s wallet etc, there are two sets of measures to which experience branders ought to pay special attention.
^Capturing the level of their customers’ active commitment to the brand
It is necessary to ascertain whether the customers are merely aware of the brand or are they loyal, returning for new products and services as their needs change, whether they are the advocates of the brands who actively recommend the brand to others. The UK Telephone bank First Direct, for instance, regularly asks its customers whether they would recommend the brand to their friends and family members. Customer satisfaction is so high that 87% of respondents say they would do so.
^ Quantifying the degree of success in delivering the promised brand experience
It is essential to quantify the degree of success in delivering the promised brand experience, including the customer’s subjective experience as well as the staff’s performance. This is where many institutions fall short. For instance, in banks they gauge performance by looking at the error rates, the lengths of lines in the branch, or the speed with which loan applications are processed etc. Such measures are useful, but they cannot really capture how things feel to the customer. Most successful experience branders measure the customer’s subjective experience and then focus on all the details required to get it right. One leading international apparel retailer, for example, does not ascertain whether its employees greet customers; it also gauges customers’ perceptions of the sincerity of the greeting. Schwab, for instance, sends the information related to consumer satisfaction back to the local branches from where it originated (See Box; Schwab shops the way the customers shop).
Unfortunately, most of the research tools and satisfaction surveys that are used to understand how customers rate their brand focus on what managers consider important, not on how customers experience a product. Most large-scale surveys measure frequency of use and ask broad questions about service, sales help and value. But they are not being able to capture the nuances of customer feelings; they cannot elucidate the complex shades of consumer perception. Nor are they detailed enough to pinpoint problems which usually go unidentified until long after they have eroded their market share. To get to the heart of how customers experience a brand, it is needful to elicit fleeting
impressions and tentative feelings. And studying the incipient perceptions cannot be done by asking standard questions but by experiencing the product along with the customers. That would mean shopping with them and paying attention to what they look at, consider and touch. It would be by listening to the questions they ask the salespeople and seeing how they react to the answers. It can also be done better by meeting them in their homes and offices in order to understand who they are and how they live.

A Guiding Vision
Service companies seem to have a higher awareness of the importance of brand experience than packaged good manufacturers. As early as the 1970s, for instance, Jan Carizon, head of SAS Airlines recognised his company around a concept he called “Moments of truth”. Thirty seconds with an agent at the counter, he discovered, is all it takes for customers to conclude that they are dealing with a great or a lousy airline.
The challenge of managing a customer’s experience comes from the fact that it happens out on the front lines of the company. In many cases, few employees know first hand what is happening to the customers. More frequently, managers who are making major decisions on new investments or process redesign have little idea of the end-to-end impact those decisions will have on the customer experience.
Managing the brand experience requires defining the essence of the customer experience one wants to achieve, and making sure that everyone, from top to bottom, understands clearly how the brand can influence the daily lives of the customers. In one such case, a series of videos are created, demonstrating its target customer experience. These videos are shown not only to marketing managers but also to the systems developers who are building the support infrastructure that will enable the experience. No written list of system requirements can ever substitute for the visceral understanding that people develop when they see and hear customer’s experience with the product.
Before launching an advertising campaign or promotion, it is needful to ask oneself how your investment decisions affect the customer experience, and if everyone, senior executives to counter clerks - is aware of how much the brand’s value hinges on the quality of experience the brand delivers. Here are some questions to consider:
* Can you describe the end-to-end experience, through “learn-buy-get-use-pay-service”, that different customer segments experience? Could you present it in a video to the employees?
*H Do you have specific measures that track your ability to overcome the dissatisfactions (such as long waits for delivery and repairs, inaccuracies in orders and billings) customers encounter as they progress through the brand experience?
* Can the ripple effect of problems from misleading marketing claims to consumer distemper to service calls and product returns be mapped? Can the economic implication of fixing the problems be ascertained?
* What is the value of delivering an experience that consistently produces apostles and eliminates brand blasters?
* Can a pilot program and learning environment be developed to analyse how customers respond to the new product or service before launching new types of branding experience?
Need to do it yourself
It takes firsthand experience to understand the interaction between the customer, the product and the environment; to see how the customers’ impressions inform their decisions; and to recognise moments of truth. If only one knows where and when decisions are made, one can offer customers new information to enhance the perceptions of the brand. This is imperative for one as the economics of retaining ones best customers over a lifetime are compelling. To create a flawless brand experience, it is needful to map the customers’ current purchase and use cycle, identify areas of improvement, design a better process, including specific steps to make every contact flawless, measure performance customer by customer and instil the vision of perfection in all your associates and reward excellent performances.
Getting close to customers takes time and effort, but the lifetime value of a customer who is always delighted and never disappointed is well worth it to you, your organisation and your customers.
The world around us is changing fast beyond recognition. And so is the temperament of the custodians of civilisation. Resultantly, brand management is at a turning point. And brands have to deliver to be successful. With a unique experience to offer to their buyers, brands have to cut through the clutter and leave behind a long-lasting impression. The experience with them ought to introduce the consumers to a perception that gives a better expression to their inner-selves - so much so that it becomes a tryst that gets deeply ingrained in their minds and creates an impact to reckon with. Thus, by peddling experiences, creating demands and by inspiring men to remain involved with life in every possible way, brands are delineating new standards of life and are teaching their creators “the art of living”.

---

You may email your feedback to smeditor@indiatimes.com

Reference:
Reference has been taken from the following articles and all rights of the authors and publishers of the respective articles are reserved.
1. What makes the winning brands different, Buchholz, Andreas, and Wordemann, Wolfram, , John Wiley and Sons, 2000
2. World’s Most valuable Brands: A closer Look at Measuring Brands, Rusch, Robin D., www.brandchannel.com
3. Uncovering the value of brands, Court, David C., Freeling, Anthony, Leiter, Mark C. and Parsons, Andrew J., The McKinsey Quarterly, 1996, Number 4
4. What makes a brand great, Grimaldi, Vincent, www.brandchannel.com
5. Brand leverage, Court, David C., Leiter, Mark C., Loch, Mark A., The McKinsey Quarterly, 1999, Number 2
6. Meeting the challenge of the post-modern consumer, Tybout, Alice M., Carpenter, Gregory S., Master Marketing, Business Standard, November 2001, Friday 2
7. Marketing Management, Philip Kotler, Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited, September 1999
8. Consumer Behaviour, Leon G. Schiffman and Leslie Lazar Kanuk, Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited, October 2000
9. Brand positioning through advertising in Asia, North America and Europe the role of global consumer culture, Aloden, Dana L., Steenkamp, Jan-Benedict E.M. and Batra, Rajeev, Journal of Marketing, January 1999
10. The final frontier, Bhattacharjee, Pallavi and Jayaram, Anup, Business World, 19 February 2001
11. Cult Brands, Melamie Wells, Brand Equity, 18 April 2001
12. Brand zealots: Realizing the full value of emotional loyalty, Rozanski, Horacio D., Baum, Allen C and Wolfsen, Bradley T., Fourth Quarter 1999, www.strategy-busines.com
13. If Nike can “just do it”, why can’t we, Court, David C., Freeling, Anthony, Leiter, Mark G., and Parsons, Andrew J., The Mckinsey Quarterly, 1997, Number 3
14. Twenty Ads That Shook the World, James B. Twitchell, Crown Publishing Group, 2000
15. http://www.bcg.com/publications