6 Keys to building a better online brand experience for your customers.

Online brand experience and customer experience is a widely discussed topic amongst brand managers and marketers, and for good reason — customers who have a better brand experience with one brand over another will naturally veer toward the brand they favour when making a purchase. It’s not rocket science.

Put simply, the customer experience includes every touchpoint between customer and company. Marketers usually break this experience into three categories: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.

These experiences extend from online forums to in-person interactions, but in today’s connected world, pre-purchase often begins online with researching a company, reading reviews, and browsing blog posts — so optimizing your brand experience across all things digital is essential.

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The Problem With Perfection

The mistake many…

Both brands and consumers are stories in progress - such stories not only simplify what could otherwise be complex facts; they unite everyone in a commonly recognized purpose

Storytelling is as old as gathering beneath the evening skies around a campfire to listen to tales, which make people laugh, cry and even question themselves. People think narratively. Filmmakers like the Coen Brothers or Steven Spielberg vividly illustrate the point.

Jungian Archetypes

As a brand psychologist, I often equate the story’s ‘hero’ to the classical ‘hero’ as explained in Jungian archetypes.

Jungian archetypes are prototypes in the human mind.  Whilst they are developed, they are neither learned nor acquired.  Their core is embedded in our DNA.

Often people mistake that the hero’s purpose is to make the brand the story’s champion.  Whilst certainly gallant, like all great heroic leaders, the brand’s true purpose is to…

Whether you’re hastily booking a last-minute meal for two, or boycotting the societal conventions and watching Netflix at home, in your PJs, it’s that time of the year again!

Boyfriends are panic buying 100 roses for £25 at Aldi and the card racks at Clinton’s are only getting larger. According to research from a retail and shopper marketing agency Savvy, 39% of shoppers said they expect to spend more on Valentine’s Day 2018 than they did last year, rising to 52% among 18-34 year-olds. In addition, 56% of respondents said that they don’t mind spending more to make the day special. The research also highlights that Valentine’s Day spending is expected to hit £726m. Yes, that’s right! Wondering how your business can benefit from this revenue? To captivate the love-ridden audiences on Valentine’s Day, marketers need to…

What is the price of love - £2.00 or £2.50?

'Roses at Triple the Price’ day is approaching. But this year, particularly for heterosexual couples, Valentine’s Day will be exceptional. 2018 marks the platinum anniversary (100 years) of women receiving the right to vote in the UK. Well, at least 8.5 million women - at the time, forty percent of the total UK adult population. The Representation of the People Act 1918 gave men aged 21 the vote. Great Britain was still at war so as a concession, men aged 19 on active service could also vote. Women had to be aged over 30, own a property or married to a man who was a homeowner. Alternatively, they had to be at university or previously studied at one. If true equality would have been applied, with all women aged over 21 getting the vote, women would have become a larger [proportion] of the electorate…

Digital branding visuals to help measure and deliver purpose

What’s the point of it all? Since the dawn of humankind, people have agonized over that highly emotive question. As we steadily slip and slide towards the second decade of the 21st Century, more than ever that question is pivotal. In the sandstorm of why…how…what… when…who… and where… Rather than instinctively turning to people for answers, we increasingly gaze through windows on wrists, laps, and desks for digital to deliver neatly packaged solutions wrapped up in brand messages with emotional ribbons and bows. Consider Turkish owned McVitie’s (United Biscuits) which combined digital (via social media) and emotions to help sell biscuits.  Emotional marketing is nothing new. However given today’s consumers wariness of algorithms, many marketers bank on emotions to help soften qualms. Such fears could be credited to many factors including the veracity of social messages (Think Russia/Trump and Twitter/Facebook)… …

How to achieve brand management and change that drives ROI

My passion is to approach brand as the most valuable asset of an organization. In working with board members around the world, I’ve learned what’s of interest to them. It’s not merely the creative aspect of brand, but much more the business administration side of branding that resonates at C-level. Boring? Yes! Getting a mandate to implement brand change. Challenging? Yes! Let me describe the relevance and ways to go about it – for change and for ongoing brand performance.

The most valuable intangible asset

Brands are an organization’s most important intangible asset, and their management is absolutely critical. According to Brand Finance, brands account for 18% of the top 500 global brands’ market-value (2017). Traditionally, brands have been created by agencies, and brand management has been undervalued. Fortunately, that mindset is now shifting, and I’m pleased to have been part of the…

How to meet today's marketing compliance challenges with an online BrandHub

Marketing departments are bursting at the seams with opportunity. Upstream they are in overdrive producing content for niche targets, using multiple agency partners and designers. Downstream, content needs to be seamlessly distributed across a range of social, web, print and broadcast media. The challenges today are not only getting great work out the door, on time and on budget, but ensuring the work is compliant from a brand and legal perspective as well. As such, having a system in place that can cater for the full lifecycle of content from creation and collaboration, to creative approvals and the centralization of final artwork, is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but rather a must-have to streamline marketing operations. Especially, when working with tight marketing deadlines and multiple stakeholders. According to Tessa Court, the CEO of IntelligenceBank DAM, “most companies are undergoing a wave…

These easy steps will make you reconsider your brand strategy

a brand is a set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that last, taken together, account for a consumer's decison to chose your product over another - Seth Godin Seth Godin's definition – listed above – summarizes exactly the true meaning of a branding performance. If consumers choose your brand over the competition’s, you win the game of business. Branding is complex. However, for your company to experience success, the branding strategy that you adopt must be carefully planned, tested, and ultimately optimized. But, if you have never done it before, it can be harsh in the beginning. We have collected several key factors that many big-level brands actively seek through their branding strategies. Success leaves clues – if we’re smart, we’ll pay close attention and adapt. If we’re not, we’re ought to spend some more time failing at what others have already failed before,…

White labeling your surveys will build trust when collecting data and help increase response rates

Protecting your brand identity in today’s digital world is of paramount importance, especially if you are engaging with customers and asking for their feedback. Consumers are savvy and something as simple as a bona fide branded domain can build trust and increase response rates to your online surveys. Does it really make a difference when so much data is collected every day? Consumers today can be reached in a multitude of different ways but respondents are wary of handing over personal data unless they know it is a legitimate request and the data will be handled and stored securely. Therefore, it’s helpful to all concerned when sending a survey invitation to be able to identify immediately who has sent the request. A simple way to ensure this is with secure domain branding. Something that can only be done with…

Use brand stories to connect with your customers

Story telling isn’t limited to novels or tucking kids into bed at night. In this age of short attention spans and masses of information being available, it’s incredibly difficult to capture someone’s attention and even more difficult to be memorable and encourage someone to spend more time focusing on your brand and business. Writing a story and building an emotional connection with your customers is one of the most effective ways to build a long lasting relationship and ensure that your customers come back over and over again, and consider your business their first choice in all their needs. The following five steps help to create stories that make you memorable and appealing to customers. Writing a story and building an emotional connection with your customers is one of the most effective ways to build a long lasting relationship and ensure that your customers…