And what is the perception of a brand built on? Emotion or reason?
We generally adopt a rational point of view when analyzing and justifying an emotional perception. Take McDonald’s, for example. My arguments could be: they offer fast service, they’re near where I live and I like their fries. So I like the McDonald’s brand. That’s the thought pattern often applied to brands.
But what we’ve learned from the research of economics Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman is the behavioural economic model. Roughly speaking, what that means is that our brain operates at two speeds. There’s a more emotional part of the brain (fast thinking), which can process a lot of information very quickly, and therefore more intuitively, and there’s another part of the brain that is slower (slow thinking), which can only process a smaller amount of information more slowly. If I ask you how you’re doing today, you’ll answer automatically without even thinking about it: “Fine.” But if I ask you the answer to a complex mathematical equation, you’ll probably need time to think.
People tend to believe that brands have rational characteristics upon which we base our perception of them, but it’s the reverse. We first have an emotional perception of a brand, then after we find rational arguments to reinforce our predisposition towards the brand. So basically, the brand is an emotional construct.
That doesn’t mean we can’t influence how people feel about a brand. One of the challenges in strategy is finding how to deconstruct erroneous perceptions based on obsolete information. Those are major challenges in understanding and education that inbound techniques can respond to.
How do you handle that as a strategist?
I’ll get back to Kahneman. In his work on memory and experience, the observation he made is that we often remember our more recent experiences much better than all of our past experiences. Tests performed on people receiving medical procedures have now shown that someone who experiences a higher level of pain throughout a procedure which then diminishes at the end will have a reduced perception of pain compared to someone that experiences a lower level of pain that increases.
Ouch! How does that translate to brands?
Brand perception is equivalent to the last experience customers had with it. I could have been going to the same barbershop for 20 years because I like the service, but if my last haircut was unpleasant, it’s highly likely that I won’t ever go back. Unfortunately, it only takes one bad experience to change everything. That’s why you have to work very hard to offer an exceptional customer experience every time.
What’s interesting is that when you compare brands and customer experience, these two concepts are intimately linked. The brand tells you what the company does, how it does it and, most importantly, why it does it.
You think about Why, How, and What.
Simon Sinek’s idea, exactly. The brand will express these kinds of things, but customer experience is kind of like the back end of marketing. It will structure your elements so that you can actually do what you say you can do. Your brand is your store window, and customer experience is what happens when you go inside. It’s important to structure things internally to produce a good customer experience, so that your brand perception is good. Everything is interrelated and influences everything else.
Do brands generally achieve that?
Never forget that we’re talking about people. We can talk about consumers, about target markets, but they’re still people with full schedules like us, who are thinking about their family barbecue, about their youngest’s soccer practice. You have to reach out to talk to them, you have to think about them. Empathy will enable a good strategy for differentiation, including listening to people and practising good emotional intelligence.
How do you talk to people, how do you connect with them? How do they feel when they use your product? Numbers are important, and it’s important to have good #analytics, but you should never forget that we’re also talking about human beings. It’s also important to reach out and take the pulse of things directly. If you have questions about your customers, get out of your office. Go out and meet with them.