The Underappreciated Value of Brand Experience - Whitespace Opportunity for B2B Brands

Branding is much talked about and little understood, even by experienced marketers because it is complex, combining both tangible and intangible elements. In the B2B environment, because there are more players on both the selling side and the buying side, this complexity becomes even more daunting. In snooping around brand paradigms we've been looking for good ways to deconstruct these challenges for the course, and while there's a lot of 'brand stuff' out there, we're focusing on the core aspects of brand-building that are executed through the marketing plan: Brand Experience, Brand Trigger and Brand Perception.

In our analysis, the secret to brand-building around an authentic brand is to value Experience as much as Trigger and Perception and to view them as holistically related. This emphasis on Brand Experience is especially important in a Web 2.0 world where your audience participates in co-creating their own Brand Experience with you. But this focus doesn't always come easily to many marketers, whose budgets are wrapped around the creation and measurement of Triggers and Perception, but it has always been the secret to powerful brand-building. In the B2B and B2G spaces particularly, Brand Experience is critically important and complex.

In our research I thought I'd come upon a great paradigm a few weeks ago on the MarketingProf's Daily Fix blog when I read Paul Williams' Think Reputation Instead of Brand post. It's a great article about how to think of brand-building as building your own or your company's reputation (and it's got a great list of resources). I read it thinking, "Wow, this is great! I agree with him!" But I kept getting hung up on his metaphor in comparing a brand with a reputation. It bugged me for over a week and I think I've finally figured out why.

If a brand was little more than a reputation, our brand fate would always be in the hands of others. But in fact, it's not in their hands, it's in ours and in their relationship with us.

Paul is absolutely right that a brand is a difficult concept to comprehend, much less manage. And he's also right that reputation is a primary factor in evaluating how your brand is perceived, however we don't think you should stop there in trying to understand and shape your company's brand. Why? Because to speak of a brand as strictly an external phenomenon in terms of how your company is perceived by others skews the balance too heavily on Perception. A thing cannot be perceived unless it exists in the first place, is understood as a holistic entity and (finally) is perceived. And so branding must be examined in three parts:

1. Brand Experience: Your company or product/service must be experienced by audiences in order for it to have a reputation and an identity for them. What is the sum total of your audiences' experience with your company? In person? On the phone? With your product or service? In writing? In visual media? In interactive media? In social media? What does your stakeholder touchpoint analysis tell you about the frequency and quality of those experiences? Make sure you include all the stakeholders and players in your audience and your company, which in a B2B or B2G organizational sale can be a lot of people!

2. Brand Trigger: For an audience to associate a brand with its experience you must create trigger stimuli (e.g., logos, tag lines, spokespeople, methodologies, user paradigms, specialized vocabulary etc.) that unify all their brand experience in #1 above in the audiences' mind. What triggers do you give your audience to associate your brand name with their experience? Are the triggers deployed consistently and frequently enough to stimulate the association each time it is encountered?

3. Brand Perception: An experience which becomes associated with your brand leaves a perception in the mind of the audience. For it to become a lasting perception it has to be notable. For it to become a trusted brand you have to leave perceptions of most importance to your audience. As marketers we do spend a lot of energy trying to understand how we are perceived (e.g., market research and brand awareness studies) and it gives us important information about how Experience really translates. Armed with a in-depth understanding of Perception, we can more effectively fine-tune the Experience and Triggers. This process of refinement should consume the majority of our time when we're not launching new initiatives and beginning this cycle all over again.

We will come back to this three-way construct many times in future posts and in our course materials because these are three important lenses through which to build a branding program for any audience. For the business or government audience in an organizational sale, these three lenses provide focus for the marketing department to work with other departments on developing the experience (product development, account management, customer/technical support, implementation/operations, sales), communicating the trigger (all of the above plus communications and public relations) and measuring the perception (all of the above plus research).

And there's the rub. The brand is a result of activity that is managed by groups far beyond the marketing department. Every marketer knows the frustration of being held accountable to "impossible" objectives, the execution of which are beyond their control as they try to construct the puzzle of public perception. [Notice we did not join the hew and cry of some of you readers when you thought "sales!" since if we did we would just engender an answering wail of "marketing!" and this post is not about that.]

In our experience most B2B companies really don't "get" this holistic brand paradigm in which it is the whole company working together to create the brand and manage it. Most company executives still think of branding as "marketing's job" and while a good CMO or VP should be a major brand leader internally, it's the CEO in the end that has managerial oversight over all the organizations (internally and externally) that create the brand experience.

Here lies a major opportunity for B2B and B2G companies to improve their market position via branding, by looking at "employee and customer satisfaction" through a brand lens, which is fundamentally deeper and richer than scorecards and surveys they are used to using. It's also a new way to think of evaluating "Brand ROI" by factoring in more than sales and revenue numbers. The cost of ignoring this opportunity is high and even the big brands get caught more visibly now, thanks to the talkback nature of social media. (If you're not familiar with Dell Hell, read up!). The ability for employees and customers to surface the ugly underbelly of their Brand Experience outside of scorecards and surveys has made every company vulnerable to branding efforts which are too focused on Triggers and Perception and not focused enough on Experience.

Watch for future posts where we dive more deeply into this paradigm and develop specific approaches to managing the entire program across Experience, Trigger and Perception. We'll also talk about how to educate your executive team as to the important role they play in building and managing the brand.

Comments

[Dana Theus]

Rolv:

As a regular communications channel, employee email is an excellent way to support the company's brand. It is part of the "experience" of interfacing with that individual person when they touch customers, partners, vendor and anyone else through their company persona. In fact, many companies provide email "signatures" they ask their employees to use for just this purpose.

In the era of Social Media, where individuals are often participating as "themselves" and yet also as a representative of their company - and where their own personality is viewed as an asset, this practice has come under fire in some quarters as being "anti individual". There are many ways to address this - from providing multiple "approved" messages for people to choose from to publishing themes that you encourage your employees to support through their choice of personal signature message (e.g., "pro green").

Even the choice of how individual to encourage your employees to be is a statement about your brand because of the experience it creates among those your employees interact with.

[Rolv Heggenhougen]

What about using the regular external email that employees send every day anyway to brand the company?