Today’s discerning and rather capricious consumers (and I very much count myself as one of them) demand a flawless experience from the moment they start to engage with your brand and forever thereafter. Not delivering makes a consumer more likely to look elsewhere. It may sound obvious, but the importance of this point is often overlooked, so that the end-to-end customer journey is at best disjointed, or at worst, truly terrible.
There are, from my perspective, a number of reasons for this.
First is the perception that brand reputation is one of the most important factors when considering purchase. This might have well have been the case before we had the internet, tablets, smartphones and bucketloads of information at our fingertips (and the communication and purchase opportunities they bring with them). But it isn’t anymore; while 34% of retailers think that brand reputation is the most important factor when choosing a retailer, 85% of consumers said that it was not, and that they place a higher value on a more personalised experience, particularly online.
Second, while we may have kept up with developments in our technology-enabled world, we don’t all yet take full advantage of the incredible capability to serve up personal and relevant messaging to both potential and existing customers. That’s because there is a tendency to put it all into a somewhat ill-defined box marked “digital” and then not apply the marketing principles and rigour that are applied to other consumer facing channels. The result? A disconnect between channels and a disjointed customer journey.
There is a remedy: stop putting things in boxes and using the word “digital” as a catch-all for technology enabled communication and start identifying marketing activity by channel. Only then can we apply equal rigour, ensuring they all connect to each other, reflect the brand and talk to the target audience in the right way, on the right channel, at the right time. That’s how we make sure it is a pleasure to buy and provide a truly seamless brand experience that will keep customers coming back for more. It only works if it all works.
Fiona O’Brien is planning director of JWT
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