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Make Your Brand Matter. Experience-Driven Solutions to Capture Customers and Keep Them Loyal. Edition No. 1

  • Book

  • 224 Pages
  • August 2022
  • John Wiley and Sons Ltd
  • ID: 5841839
Combine brand and experience into a single, exciting whole to drive growth

The Digital Transformation era has come and gone. Experiential concepts like personalization, transparency, transference, uniquity, and immediacy are now table stakes in an increasingly connected and responsive market. Companies that failed to ante up are already gone - or fading fast.

In Make Your Brand Matter, serial entrepreneur and brand strategist Steve Soechtig delivers an eye-opening discussion of the post-Digital Transformation era in which we now live. The book walks you through the evolution of brand and experience, leveraging examples of historical and digitally native brands that have succeeded and failed to seize the digital moment.

You’ll discover brands that enabled new customer acquisition, customer value optimization, and customer loyalty, all the while realizing that brand and experience are two sides of the same coin. The book also offers: - Strategies, techniques, and activities for teams to capture digital opportunities - Discussions of why brand and experience reinforce one another and how experiences must embrace, reflect, and enforce brand identity - Tactics to accelerate the customer’s progression from evaluator to loyal advocate

Make Your Brand Matter is an essential resource for marketing professionals. It also belongs on the bookshelves of company founders, owners, managers, executives, and other business leaders seeking to develop their organization’s ability to marry brand and experience into one coherent and exciting package.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Better Lucky Than Good xiii

What to Expect from This Book xvii

Chapter 1

A Far Too Brief History of Brand Strategy 1

The Emergence of Modern Brand Strategy 2

The Intersection of Brand and Experience 3

The Criticality of Experience 10

Chapter 2

The Dawn of Digital 15

The Birth of the Internet 17

Online Advertising Begins 18

Personalization of the Online Customer Experience 19

The E- Mail Explosion 23

Customer Expectations and Technological Innovation 25

Emerging from the Digital Transformation Era 29

Chapter 3

Focusing on the Modern Consumer 31

Millennial Expectations 32

Generation Z Expectations 35

The Customer Funnel 36

Awareness 37

Evaluation 40

Transactions 43

Engagement 44

Loyalty 45

Chapter 4

Believing in Your Brand and Redefining Your Strategy 47

Experience Defines the Brand 48

Building a Culture Through Data Analytics and Engagement 53

Location Through Data Analytics 55

Leveraging Technology to Drive Engagement and Growth 56

Turning Brand Promise into Reality 58

Chapter 5

Selling Experiences, Not Products 61

Commoditized Brands Become Invisible 62

Customers Control Branding 63

Replacing Products with Experiences 64

A Foundation of Innovation and Performance 65

Creating an Engaged Community 69

Pivoting to Gain Market Share 74

The Fusion of Digital and Physical Personalization 76

Customer Connection, Personalization, and Omnichannel Strategy 81

Chapter 6

Time Is the New Currency - Anticipating without Being Invasive 85

Collapsing Time 86

Time- Saving Conveniences 90

Data- Driven Innovations 93

Making Quick Service Quicker 97

Post- Digital Data and Loyalty 101

Four Time- Based Lessons 103

Chapter 7

Finding a Novel Approach to Solving a Market Need 107

Ambassadors of Innovation 109

Strategic Innovations in CRM 112

Novel Omnichannel Engagement 116

Building Innovation into Your Brand Strategy 118

Chapter 8

Humanizing the Experience 123

Understanding People’s Needs 124

Expanding an Exclusive Market to Everyone 128

Human- First Engagement 130

Risking Controversies for Growth 134

Humanizing Effectively 137

Chapter 9

Connecting Your Customer with Your Cause 141

Embracing Corporate Social Responsibility 142

Shifting from Brand Identity to Social Cause 145

Authentic and Proactive Leadership 148

Engaging and Inspiring the Community 149

Committing to the Cause 151

Chapter 10

Looking to the Future 155

Innovation with a Large I 156

Predictions Sometimes Miss the Mark 157

Emerging Experience Trends 160

AI- Enabled Conversational Interfaces 161

Augmented Reality 166

The Metaverse and NFTs 169

Chapter 11

Where You Should Begin 179

Three Approaches to Assessments 179

Three Prerequisites for Assessments 181

Three Areas of Assessments 182

Agile Experience Innovation 184

Notes 187

About the Author 197

Index 199

Authors

Steven G. Soechtig