What brand experience means post COVID-19?
Brand experience is essentially positive experiences that facilitate deeper connections with the brand, ability to maintain customer stickiness, and ultimately deliver customer happiness on a continuous basis. If your brand experience is lacklustered, audiences won’t engage. And that’s exactly what Jerry Gregoire reminds us- “The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” What better time to check the relevance of this quote?
Since Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally redefined the consumer needs and expectations, brands have to realign the way they do business too. The need for convenience, personalization, shopping on-trend, multi-channel engagement, and bias towards healthy living are basic expectations now. This global health pandemic has shined a harsh light on the vulnerabilities and challenges humanity faces and a clearer picture of what brand experience would mean, post-Covid-19. Here are some thoughts:
Affordability and Availability over Brand Loyalty
We observed over the last few months scarcity at various stages of value chain. Customer were left with fewer (in some cases only one brand choice) choices. One of the learnings of the pandemic has been “Consumers take what they can get when they can get it.” For instance, hand sanitizer that reeks of tequila. Likewise, with unemployment in the country and the Covid-19 death toll increasing, the situation has changed drastically for people. More the reason that brands need to consider price over preference when adapting for the future. Rather than focusing on why something is worth the price, these brands need to be focusing on making valuable resources available and affordable.
Social Responsibility is Brand’s Responsibility
Covid-19 has thrown socio-economic inequalities into sharp relief. Studies recommend that brands with clout are morally obligated to address these inequalities. Likewise, customers expect brands to take action in support of the inequalities highlighted. The new brand experience, post-covid-19 that customers seek is one driven by activism. Organizations should come up with ways to use their platform to provide an avenue for customers to impact positive change.
Brands That Give Back
Money helps, but it cannot fix all our problems as a nation. While monetary donations are still perceived as a powerful gesture of goodwill and community support, customers want effort at a local level. One of the examples that H&M donated its entire supply chain to manufacture and distributed personal protective equipment to underserved hospitals and medical centers. Similarly, U-HAUL provided free trucks and storage to students in communities after Covid-19 forced them to move off-campus. Donations and distributions like these will help families and create memorable experiences.
Meeting Your Customers’ Needs
The experiences of customers are built on their expectations. Brands must understand what customers expect from their brands, which includes customer support that, at a minimum, meets their needs but ideally surpasses what they have anticipated. Above all else, customers want experiences that help them feel safe. If brands are to create that experience, they need to understand the new emotional needs of the customers that include: the need to see themselves as good decision-makers, smart, and thrifty shoppers. Before anything can be done, brands need to ensure they know the audience’s new needs. Only then can brands create authentic, meaningful, and memorable experiences that will appeal to their audiences.
Creating a great brand experience takes preparation. However, the most successful brands will be those who put just as much effort into delivering quality products or services as they do act as great partners to their customers. To that end, it’s time that brands reframe their line of thinking. They must assess that do their products or services align with the customers’ new normal?
