Life 2.0

Experiential marketing doesn’t work…

That’s right…I said it.  Experiential marketing doesn’t work.

Call me a hippocrate.  Call me a disgruntled former employee.  It’s OK - I’d probably do the same thing.  But you know what, it doesn’t.

Neither does advertising.  Direct mail hasn’t worked for ages.  Even social media doesn’t work.

As much as marketers look to their agencies big and small to help them build their brands with break-through creative, engage consumers experientially and create virtual communities of evangelists through social media, they’re missing the single most important thing that matters most…the customer’s actual experience with the brand.

The customer’s personal experience is everything.  The customer’s experience IS the brand.

And the customer’s experience is created by every single interaction they have with a brand - each touch point before, during and after the sale.  Get one wrong, and you’re screwed.

And if you truly take the time to create a map of the 3 key customer experiences…

• the physical experience
• the virtual experience,
• the personal experience

…I bet you’ll find out the majority of the crucial customer touch points have absolutely nothing to do with marketing - or your agency.  Yet they are VITAL to the health and well-being of your brand.

Did Toyota’s brand implode because their fan page on Facebook sucked?

Did Southwest Airlines brand get scorched by Kevin Smith because their website didn’t have a great user interface?

Over the past year, our work in The Greenhouse has proven to me that without a doubt, our brand will live or die based solely on our customer’s experience.

We’ve got the nice SEO optimized website, clever ads (that tested well) with good strategic placements, a social media strategy that is tweaked with every Google Analytics report, a focused WOM campaign with our PTA Momvocates…we’ve got the marketing plan…

But as we map our actual customer experience and analyze the key touchpoints that really matter, most of those touch points have NOTHING to do with marketing.

Here’s the good news for us…the CEO, CMO, COO, CFO, COO, CXO, CTO - our entire executive team is all of 2 people, so we can adjust our brand quickly to react to the needs of our customer.

Can you say the same for your brand?  Is your entire company aligned around the customer experience?  Do you really know what that experience looks like?

8 March 2010 ·