Why Companies Don’t Own Their Branding – Their Customers Do  

Branding used to be an internal process, reflecting marketing executives’ vision of how they wanted the public to perceive their company. Now, thanks to the rise of social media, review websites like Kununu and empowered consumers who aren’t shy about sharing their opinions, that model has been turned on its head. What customers say about a brand directly affects how it is viewed by external audiences.  Ultimately, they are telling the brand’s story, whether that reflects the marketing department’s ideals or not.

That’s a scary thought for most marketers, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the primary advantages to this customer-driven branding model is that it provides valuable opportunities to learn what consumers want. The key to success is applying greater insight to make customer centricity an integral part of your business. Staying competitive means company leaders need to think like marketers and keep brand reputation in mind in everything they do, from employee training to every phase of the journey.

Providing a Meaningful Customer Journey

Building a customer journey has always meant understanding consumers’ habits and how they engage throughout their experience with a company. Today, we are able to support this systematically by   tracking sentiment along the way. Beyond monitoring review sites and social media channels, many companies rely on customer-satisfaction metrics such as “voice of the consumer” surveys, which collect feedback and opinions at various phases of the journey to see where communication breakdowns occur and what pleases or disappoints. Others may poll their audience to calculate a Net Promoter Score, which measures how likely consumers are to recommend a brand to others.

Companies must then work to influence consumer opinion through means they can control. For example, identifying problematic areas at certain touchpoints, such as a onboarding or close of sale, can lead to adjustments to improve the overall experience. Through this lens, every interaction becomes an opportunity not just to provide service but to make corrective actions to accommodate consumer needs.

Listening and Learning From Customer Sentiment

Monitoring interactions throughout the journey means organizations end up with vast amounts of data. While analyzing it may seem overwhelming, it’s essential to uncover valuable consumer perspective trends, such as common customer questions or what people like best about a brand. To a savvy marketer, these insights are a treasure trove of ideas because they are based on feedback, which marketers can use to steer content strategy to reflect the customer’s voice in a more authentic and appealing way.

This is especially true when it comes to attracting Millennials and Gen Z consumers, an important audience whose buying power is on the rise. Their expectations are wildly different from past generations’, with shorter attention spans and their discernment toward traditional marketing tactics like commercials – they are quick to tune out irrelevant messaging. This type of instant gratification also applies in today’s social media-driven world where people expect valuable engagements and instant feedback.

If an organization fails to have a communication plan to support the constructs that matter most to their audience, such as trust, transparency and convenience, its brand will soon see fallout.  Essentially, it’s a two-way dialogue, and when users talk, marketers must listen.

Building a Customer-Centric Company Culture

The term “company culture” is often used in the context of the internal philosophy leaders have embedded in the workplace. However, company culture influences experience because it sets the foundation, including identifying the right hires that associate with the company’s core values and those who align with the processes intended to drive customer relationships. In this era of experience-driven branding, the customer must be central to a company’s core mission that employees must not only understand but embody.

Guidelines must be ingrained in the organization from the top down so that each employee at every touchpoint along the journey – and across all channels – reflects consistent values.  A key part of that is training. Companies must approach training in a way that keeps customer centricity front and center, emphasizing that each interaction not only speaks volumes for the brand but could affect it going forward. When employees communicate with customers, they are not only representing the company, but they are also helping define it. These interactions present opportunities to shape how a person feels about a company and, in the age of constant noise, it is one that should be well calculated.

Power has shifted and organizations are no longer solely responsible for determining how their brands are perceived. Leaders must work from the outside in to gain a holistic picture of their strengths and weaknesses to build a more customer-centric brand strategy. It may be hard to step back and let customers determine what a company’s value proposition actually is versus what the marketing department imagines it to be, but once companies embrace that reality, it paves the way for more a prosperous future with current customers and those to come.