Optimize the brand experience

Editor’s note: Andy Greenfield is CEO of Greenfield Consulting Group, a Westport, Conn., research firm.

Pick a category - any category - and in 2004, you will find that across almost any product or service category you can think of, commoditization is increasing at a rapid rate. And, as commoditization increases, our ability to differentiate our brands in meaningful and relevant ways decreases, as does our ability to maintain or support our price points. And when commoditization strikes, the result is that consumers tend to view all the major players in a product or service category as delivering on primary category requirements at comparable - and acceptable - levels. The result is that, all too often, the primary differentiator between brands becomes price. And under these circumstances, the power of brands - and, thus, their value - begins to be threatened as well. Not an ideal situation for brand marketers, to say the least.

And even categories we thought were relatively immune to commoditization, such as pharmaceuticals, are now rapidly facing the onslaught of multiple competitors, all delivering on primary category requirements at comparable levels.

So what is a marketer to do? Historically most marketers have often focused on two strategies to support and promote their brands - either trying to achieve a product improvement/breakthrough and/or trying to link their brand to a higher-order emotional benefit. Both these approaches are time-tested, smart, relevant ways of attacking the challenge presented by commoditization. However, in 2004, both these strategies are increasingly difficult to count on or implement. Product improvements/breakthroughs are great and can truly make a difference for a consumer. However, they are typically hard to engineer or predict, expensive to look for and implement and, in most cases, are quickly duplicated by competitors. What about the strategy of attaching your brand to higher-order emotional benefits? Well, today these benefits are increasingly harder to find and are launched into an increasingly cluttered media environment against an increasingly cynical consumer. Long gone are the days when consumers could readily be swayed by advertising that suggested that “using the right food wrap will make me a better mother.”

Does this mean companies should stop thinking about product/technology breakthroughs or higher-order emotional benefits? No. However, it does suggest that marketers need to think about other strategies to compete effectively.

Is the situation really as bleak as it sounds? Absolutely not. There are plenty of opportunities for marketers to increase the differentiation and relevance of their brands if they start thinking more broadly about their brands - and how consumers actually experience their brands. When marketers begin to do this, they will start to see numerous opportunities to do what we call brand engineering. Brand engineering helps marketers optimize the consumer’s experience of their brand and increase the brand’s perceived differentiation and relevance - two key drivers of brand preference and brand value.

The process of brand engineering - which is inherently qualitative - has three components. First, a brand experience audit (BEA); second, an assessment of which elements of the brand experience are worth optimizing; and third, an effort to “engineer” those elements to help optimize the brand experience.

Step 1: The brand experience audit (BEA)
In essence, this involves looking through the consumer’s eyes to appreciate all the aspects of how the consumer experiences your brand. Here, when possible, we typically employ a wearable video camera, worn by the consumer, which allows us to actually see how the consumer experiences the brand. We then show the consumer the video of his/her brand experience, and interview him/her as he/she reacts to and explains the brand experience. From being made aware of the brand, to shopping for it, buying it, assembling it/learning to use it/using it, through to dealing with or resolving product/service problems, the brand experience audit provides a window into multiple dimensions of the consumer’s experience of your brand.

Here are some examples of brand experience across multiple product/service categories - any of which can be discovered through a BEA - and all of which represent meaningful opportunities to improve the consumer’s experience of a brand:

  • financial services - standing in line at a bank;
  • cell phones - using the owner’s manual to help set up and configure the cell phone;
  • pharmaceuticals - using the directions to help administer an inhaled Rx drug;
  • food - opening, using, then resealing a bag of flour, etc.;
  • technology - using an automated customer service help line to resolve a problem.

Note two very important things about these examples: first, none of these elements of the brand experience have anything to do with the product or service itself - yet they have everything to do with how the consumer experiences the brand. And second, the vast majority of marketers pay little attention to these types of things.

Step 2: Assessing which elements of the brand experience are worth optimizing
This part of the brand engineering process involves three elements:

A. As you review the brand experience videotapes with consumers, look for elements of the experience that are similar across most category providers; or for areas of category inertia (elements of the brand experience that have changed very little over the years). Focus in particular on elements that are viewed as neutral-to-negative parts of the brand experience.

B. Assess the degree to which you are either competitively advantaged, neutral, or disadvantaged relative to these elements.

C. Determine whether the features of the brand experience you are thinking about are sufficiently salient, so that if they were addressed, the consumer would both notice and care. This is the most critical step.

These three steps can typically be pursued employing focus groups or one-on-ones.

Answers to A, B and C above will provide good guidance for determining whether or not the elements of the brand experience you have identified are worthy of your engineering efforts.

Step 3: Engineering elements of the brand experience
At this point in the brand engineering process, you have looked through the consumer’s eyes to appreciate his/her experience of your brand and have identified elements of that experience worthy of your engineering/optimizing efforts. The final step involves engineering individual elements of the brand experience to optimize the consumer’s overall experience of your brand. This involves three steps: wishing, stealing and ideating.

  • Wishing: This is a relatively straightforward step, which involves nothing more than having the consumer make a wish relative to the brand experience element in question. For example, “I wish it was easier to buy a car,” “I wish there was no line at the bank,” “I wish the owner’s manual was easier to understand,” “I wish that I didn’t have to sit on the phone for 15 minutes waiting for customer service to give me some help.” These wishes can be used to provide direction for the next two engineering activities - stealing and ideating.
  • Stealing: This involves identifying and stealing best practices from categories that have successfully dealt with the consumer wishes you are trying to help make come true. For example, if you are dealing with the issue of simplifying complex material (such as an owner’s manual), steal from someone who has effectively dealt with the issue, such as the “For Dummies” series of books, or, perhaps to address the issue of standing in a line/waiting, steal from the fast-food industry or airline industry, both of which have developed strategies for dealing with lines or waiting.
  • Ideating: Here, you would use the consumer’s wish to serve as an ideation springboard. Traditional group dynamics ideation techniques can be effectively used to springboard off consumer wishes, incorporating stolen best practices to help develop tactics and strategies for optimizing key elements of the brand experience.

Proven techniques

The three-step approach detailed above involves the straightforward application of three different qualitative techniques - video-enabled ethnography, followed by one-on-ones/groups, followed by ideation. None of what has been described is black-box - rather, the process involves proven and time-tested techniques that can be employed to help optimize the brand experience and, in so doing, enhance the brand’s differentiation, relevance and value - and ultimately, its ability to compete more effectively in the increasingly brutal marketing wars of the 21st century.

But for this process to be effective, it truly requires brand marketers to start thinking more broadly about their products and services and to observe the real world and how consumers are experiencing their brands.