By Whitney Satin
Leading B2B marketers focus on the customer experience to build loyalty and strengthen their customers’ willingness to buy more. The typical approach looks at improving the experience touchpoint-by-touchpoint— a losing strategy. Marketers instead must focus on the benefits they provide, prioritizing those touchpoints that help deliver specific benefits to customers.
Click Image to Enlarge | Customer perceptions of Unique Benefits are the best predictor of preference and intent to repurchase.
Benefits come in all shapes and sizes, but they essentially fall into one of two camps. There are some benefits that all companies try to provide, things like “easy to do business with” or “is responsive to customer feedback”. We call these Common Benefits because they’re relevant in any commercial relationship, regardless of company or industry. We also see Unique Benefits that are specific to an individual company’s experience. Things like “simplifies my supply chain” or “provides a good out-of-the-box experience” are unique in the sense that not every other company in the industry is trying to achieve them through the experience.
Together, the Common and Unique Benefits a company provides do far more to drive preference and loyalty than even the strongest touchpoint. Moreover, the companies winning with customer experience are doing so with their Unique Benefits. Why is that?
Marketers need to give customers a reason to choose their experience over a competitor’s. It’s difficult for a company to differentiate on Common Benefits. After all, what company isn’t trying to be “trustworthy” or “a valuable partner”? Common Benefits are critical for getting customers to consider a company in the first place, but they provide little leverage beyond that.
With Unique Benefits, marketers have much greater space to compete and set the company apart. In fact, for companies achieving the highest levels of preference, Unique Benefits are more than twice as powerful as Common Benefits in building preference.
What does this mean for marketers? High-preference companies exhibit several behaviors:
- They base their experience strategy on a few attributes that not everyone else in the industry is trying to achieve.
- They pick the one or two critical touchpoints that best showcase their Unique Benefit and invest heavily in those touchpoints.
- They improve all other touchpoints in a way that reinforces a Unique Benefit.
This approach gives focus and clarity to Marketing’s role in the experience and, most critically, drives strong commercial results. More on these strategies in my next post.
Related posts:
- Customer Experience Myth: Touchpoints Matter
- With Social Experience, Be Different…in a Way That Few Can Follow
- Mass Media, Welcome to Your New Supporting Role (try not to be jealous)
- Customer Experience: More Than Just a Marketing Buzzword
- Nothing to Lose But Your Chains: Touchpoint Planning in the Social (Media) Revolution
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