I met with a retail-industry member last week that’s in the midst of growing one of their businesses from a regional brand focused on Latin America to a global brand with a strong footprint in the US and the UK. As we talked about what it will take to enter a crowded retail space, our member expressed it this way, “we need to be very clear what are our brand standards and what are our brand standouts.”
I loved the simplicity of the statement and the depth of the insight. Given the increasing prevalence of mobile/social/location technologies like Foursquare, it can be awfully tough for retailers to differentiate, so the customer experience has never been more important. Do you know the difference between your brand standards and your brand standouts? If you are like most businesses, the truthful answer is “no”.
When we looked at the importance of corporate brands two years ago, more than one-third of businesses cited “customer-focused” as a brand attribute. Almost the same percentage said they were “trustworthy or ethical”. To the customer, this results in limited differentiation among brands. In fact, only 7% of individuals felt a company’s uniqueness was “different” or “very different”. Clearly, we’re very good at confusing a brand standard with a brand standout (see image below; click to enlarge).
What’s more, if we look at the lessons from our B2B research last year on Delivering a Preferred Customer Experience, the big lesson is nearly identical. Companies that are able to articulate – and deliver – a unique benefit to their customers are far more likely to win the customer loyalty battle than peers who are fighting to own a more common benefit, e.g. the brand standards for their industry.
So why is it so tough for marketers to practice what we preach? For one, we fall victim to proximity bias, our inability to see the forest for the trees. Because we’re working at it every day, at some point we begin to believe that our “customer-focused-ness” is different from what our competitors can do. And perhaps it is different. But is it so different that your customers will pay you for it, or Tweet about it, or rush to be mayor of one of your locations?
A second reason we often see retailers (and others) competing on brand standards rather than brand standouts is the reluctance to rule out some segments of customers to the benefit of other segments. Day one of Marketing 101 always begins with the same lesson – you can’t be all things to all people. While we internalize the all things part, we often forget the all people part. The idea of intentionally excluding some potential customers is tough to consider when every customer seems so precious. Yet that’s precisely where the answer rests – better segmentation and better segment understanding.
Do you have clever ways to prevent proximity bias in your organization?
MLC members, check out the Segment Learning Protocol from Dow. Or, for a classic example of aligning brand standouts to customer experience and product investments, check out the Investment Screening Protocols from Victoria’s Secret.
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