Brand experiences are co-created

Internal marketing departments (and/or their agency representatives) produce all kinds of information in the form of business communication to help direct the standard for what customers can expect from the brand. This outbound messaging may have little to do with real perceptions and experiences of the end user, instead projecting an image the brand wants the world to see.

Through the print ads and online banners, designer emails and magazine advertorials, website content and promotional literature, tweets and retail merchandising (and much more), brands own the microphone which allows them to loudly say “We’re good.  Trust us.  Hop on board and we’ll go places.” We’re bombarded with that tantalizing promise every which way we turn, and some of us get on the magic bus and ride.

It’s not until you’re strapped in that you ask yourself who’s driving the bus.

With the scenery flying past your window and the miles adding up behind you, that’s when your mind associates and re-associates all you’ve been told about the brand (remember the abundant communication from paragraph one?), reconciling with what you’re actually experiencing with the brand.  Some of your determinations will be rational, others less so.  The answer may lie within the contents of that placard in the seat pocket in front of you.  That “Our promise to you” section on the brand literature?  Are you feeling it?  Do you have reason to believe them?  Are they doing what they said they would right then, on that ride you’re on?

You’ve co-created your brand experience if the brand delivered on their promises, giving you rational and emotional reasons to believe.  If the top-down messages are embodied by the front line staff, then the promise made by the brand flows smoothly to the end user.

You experience the brand first by viewing the stage set before you (all that outbound communication again) and hearing the thoughts whispered to you by the crowd.  You then experience the brand again by becoming involved, whether you join a conversation with an agent, enter the retail space for the first time, or buy their product instead of your usual. If everything synchs, then what the brand says and what the customer-facing roles are actually doing are working perfectly.  The talking heads and the folks in the field are actually singing the same song and you, the customer, hear it loud and clear. It sounds right.

On the other hand, if what you’ve read in the literature or heard during the sales call doesn’t jibe with what you get when you email your account representative with a question, well then that’s a disconnect.  There’s no co-creation, and the brand loses because the customer doesn’t feel heard, understood, or well-considered.  He/she feels the inequity in the relationship and the chance for growing an advocate may have been lost.

What brand do you have experience with where everything synched?  What brand failed you?

*  Image courtesy of Terbeck via Flickr.