Exit through the internet

How the web disrupts brand loyalty and what to do about it Fabric Branding

Five important sources of brand loyalty that the internet has disrupted…

20th century brands built loyalty through familiarity and familiarity through repetition… …but the internet prefers novelty to repetition.

Source #1 Familiarity

Unhappy customers always told people; that was damaging. Millions of hits on YouTube is more damaging.

Source #2 The communications monopoly

Better, faster, cheaper

Source #3 Limited awareness of alternatives

Online retailers will ship anything, anywhere. Distribution is no longer the source of advantage it once was.

Source #4 Proprietary Distribution

Source #5 The allure of perfection

Lifestyle branding will always have a role to play, but the popularity of sites like YouTube show us that being “real” is increasingly more important than being “perfect”.

What’s a brand to do?

Lots of prescriptions being offered

Content Marketing

Social Media

BIG DATA Take Four

Daily

The real problem is hard to pin down

Too much focus on the latest marketing tools when the true answer lies deeper inside your business?

The true impact of the internet

Customers no longer have to stay with brands that they are not ecstatic about. No amount of clever targeting will overcome this simple truth. In almost every category, it’s too easy to switch to a new provider for a product or service.

Customer experience is the biggest driver of loyalty and customer recommendations

Note: *As measured by the Forrester Research “Customer Experience Index” Source: Forrester Research: Manning, Harley; Bodine, Kerry (2012-08-28).

0.71 0.65

Correlation between customer experience index and future purchase intent*

Correlation between customer experience index and positive word-of-mouth*

Social media is best used to support, not replace, a great customer experience

Social media offers tremendous promise for brands that can incorporate it into a broader strategy of building and managing relationships with customers.

Promotional gimmicks aimed at “buying” likes on Facebook or re-tweets on Twitter have little true impact on a brand’s fortunes. Such approaches are applying, on the internet, the very tactics that the internet has already made redundant.

Six prescriptions for building powerful brands now

1.  Outstanding experiences trump outrageous promises

2.  A great customer experience is not an accident, it must be designed

3.  Companies need to work across departmental boundaries to design and deliver those great customer experiences

4.  The best, most credible, brand stories are developed organically, through real-world interactions with customers

5.  Digital strategy and customer relationship strategy should be developed together, as two sides of the same coin

6.  Empower frontline employees to use social tools to build strong customer relationships

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