Wide Angle

It’s a question that has perplexed humankind for centuries: If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?  Now Marketing may not be known for its penchant for solving existential conundrums, but the same line of reasoning can be applied to the customer experience.  If you identify a set of benefits but the organization fails to demonstrate them, do they really exist?

We’re a biased group, so while differentiation may be the bread and butter of our world, the sad truth is that that simply isn’t the case within many B2B organizations.  Marketing can (and should) take the lead to identify the core set of unique benefits that set the company apart from competitors.  But when it comes to embedding these throughout the customer experience—that requires coordination of many moving pieces across the enterprise. Read More »

Delivering a preferred customer experience boils down to three easy steps:

• Step One: Clarify what’s unique about your experience and the distinct benefits you provide to customers.  Check.
• Step Two: Understand how customers interact with a variety of touchpoints and emphasize your unique benefits at the touchpoints that matter most.  Got it.
• Step Three: Make sure the dozens (and dozens) of other touchpoints in your customer experience reflect your unique benefits.  Hmmmmm…

We see a lot of breakdowns when it comes to this final piece of the puzzle.  To ensure that customers really understand and appreciate your unique benefits, every touchpoint must be viewed as an opportunity to reinforce or support them.  The problem, as marketers are quick to point out, is that Marketing doesn’t have enough time, money, or control to manage all the different customer touchpoints.  While it’s easy for Marketing to adjust collateral or update the Web site to better reflect benefits, it’s a different story when it comes to modifying packaging or customer service touchpoints.  New set of stakeholders, new set of rules, a whole new ballgame. Read More »

Watch a 5-minute video showing how Texas Instruments identified critical touchpoints in the customer experience.

Marketers typically use VOC as a barometer when weighing different investments in the customer experience.  But this reliance on customer voice biases marketers to only consider improvements to the existing set of touchpoints.  Existing touchpoints aren’t necessarily the best ways to engage customers and, moreover, “fixing” touchpoints that rank highly on the customer gripe list generally leads to an experience that’s comparable, not differentiated.  That’s not to say that VOC is always going to lead you astray, but its implications should be taken with a grain of salt. Read More »

When B2B marketers look for ways to improve their customer experience, they typically rely on voice of the customer (VOC) to direct their investment decisions.  More often than not, marketers tackle touchpoints that customers gripe about most frequently or fix issues mentioned by the largest customers.  But as far as helping companies demonstrate their unique benefits, this is rarely the best approach. Read More »

Articulating the unique benefits we provide to customers should be second nature for marketers, but this is much easier said than done.  Too often we get tripped up on the arms race for common benefits (e.g., “Our company is the most reliable … no REALLY!) or we fail to deliver benefits that truly resonate with customers.

Let’s table execution problems until after the holidays and turn for now to a slightly more existential challenge: what is your company’s unique identity?  This may sound trite, but here’s a quick gut check: can you articulate it in 50 words or less?  Likely not, and you’re not alone. Read More »

My New York Giants didn’t play this weekend – that’s one way to end a losing streak. I hadn’t enjoyed four consecutive losing Sundays of gesticulating wildly at my TV to no avail. But Fox, CBS, NBC, or ESPN didn’t quite care – I was watching.

As were about 17.2 million others any given Sunday, helping the NFL to their highest TV ratings in 20 years, a 15% uptick over last season. That’s an increase far beyond the 2% decline in stadium ticket sales, so much so that NFL national sponsorships are up. The pattern extends to baseball as well – World Series TV ratings were up 42% in 2009, which we can’t attribute solely to my Yankees’ return to dominance.

Clearly, we’re seeing not just changing consumer behaviors, but new, never-before-seen behaviors. A 15% viewership increase isn’t just former fans returning to TV. Our latest research on consumer behavior tells us that today’s winners are somehow helping consumers satisfy emerging desired outcomes – not the outcomes consumers say they want, but the latent (often emotional) ones that ethnographic research could uncover. Read More »

Click Image to Enlarge | A Unique Benefit-driven approach selects and improves touchpoints in a way that delivers a Unique Benefit to customers.

We know by now that leading B2B companies build customer loyalty by focusing on unique benefits—not touchpoints—as they look to enhance the customer experience.  Check out MLC’s video for a quick refresher on the research behind this.

Again, we’re not saying to let your touchpoints go by the wayside.  But while a touchpoint-driven approach to the experience seeks to optimize each touchpoint individually, companies with the highest levels of loyalty instead isolate the benefits their company can uniquely provide to customers.  They select and improve touchpoints to ensure that customers actually perceive this benefit throughout the experience. Read More »

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. Read More »

My last post looked at why the customer experience is the best opportunity for marketers to build greater loyalty with their customers.  But how do we figure out what actually matters in the experience as far as getting customers to actually prefer us?

To answer this, we surveyed over 9,000 customers from 15 member companies representing a range of B2B industries.  We asked customers to rate different aspects of the experience across three categories:

• Touchpoints—the specific interactions between a customer and the company (e.g., customer service, technical support, online experience).
• Common Benefits—the qualities every company hopes to deliver across the customer experience (e.g., is easy to do business with, trustworthy).
• Unique Benefits—qualities specific to each company, or, the sources of value that set one experience apart from another (e.g., simplifies my supply chain, provides great ‘out-out-of-the-box’ experience).

Using regression analysis, we looked at how each category contributes to customer preference and repurchase intentions.  The results were surprising.  The perceptions customers have of touchpoint performance have virtually no impact on preference. Read More »

As the economy faltered late last year, a lot of the marketers we work with started rethinking how important their brands were to consumers. With less money to spend, less access to credit, and less confidence in the U.S. economy, consumers were rethinking when and where they spent every dollar. The question marketers asked us in response was simple: “how do I become a brand consumers can’t do without?”

After a year or so of digging, we learned a very simple but compelling thing about consumer loyalty: it’s probably not you they’re loyal to in the end. While most marketers think their brands have loyal consumers, what they really have are habit-driven consumers—and when a shock occurs to a consumer’s economic reality, it probably doesn’t take much to break their “habit” with your brand. Read More »