Carolyn Schofield, Brand, Marketing and Creative Effectiveness consultant, explores the critical connection between brand positioning and customer experience in this article. She shares personal anecdotes highlighting how mismatches between a brand's promise and customer interactions can damage trust and create negative emotional associations. Carolyn emphasizes the importance of considering unintended consequences in marketing strategies to ensure the customer experience aligns with the brand's values. Read below to learn more.

Brand positioning and customer experience should go hand in hand. A brand can (and should) dedicate significant resources to establishing a strong and distinctive brand positioning, clarifying what brand attributes it needs to have to meet customer needs and communicating the brand effectively. If the experience that customers have when interacting with the brand doesn’t align with the brand promise however, all these efforts can be in vain.

In this occasional series of articles from the Brand and CX Special Interest Group we are sharing examples that we have experienced personally of where customer experience has either reinforced positive brand attributes (😊) or undermined them (☹).

Here’s my personal experience with one NZ supermarket.

In the space of two weeks, on three visits to the same supermarket the checkout cameras that are currently being trialled appeared to question my honesty.  On the first occasion it was because I put items that had been scanned back into my trolley before completing payment. Another time it was because I put an item that had damaged packaging aside rather than scanning it and the third time the technology thought a non-existent item hadn’t been scanned, which of course it hadn’t been because it didn’t exist. Each incident compounded the negative experience of my previous visit. Having never shoplifted so much as a paper clip in my life, I was starting to feel nervous just walking into the store in case I was going to be stopped by security. Maybe I just had bad luck, but if I had another option without having to travel significantly further (choice of supermarket is all about physical availability for me) I may have reconsidered my options because of the way these experiences cumulatively made me feel.  It’s understandable that supermarkets want to reduce theft and dishonesty at self-checkouts. But what if the camera technology risks undermining positive brand associations?

And what if a loyalty programme, which is meant to strengthen a customer’s relationship with the brand, inadvertently creates negative emotional associations? The same supermarket’s app now reminds me that my cat is dead every time I open it. Maybe I’d better explain that. The supermarket’s loyalty programme awards bonus reward points if you buy specific products. Now, this supermarket knows my purchase habits inside out as they have been tracking me for years. The bonuses I’m offered each week are personalised as they are in the main product categories I buy regularly. However, every week they offer me bonus rewards on cat food. The problem is my cat died months ago. They have my purchasing data. They can see that I stopped buying cat food at the beginning of the year. They can also see that my purchase patterns for other products haven’t changed so it’s unlikely that I’m buying my cat food somewhere else. I’ve just stopped buying it. And it doesn’t take a data scientist or insights expert to come up with a likely reason why people stop buying cat food. Or to prevent the algorithms they are using from offering bonuses on pet food if someone hasn’t bought it for more than a few weeks.  But every week when the bonuses change the cat food is still there. As a result, they have now created a brand association in my mind that is reinforced week after week:

Supermarket = Dead cat

Probably not one of the brand attributes they are aiming for.

Often as marketers we’re so focussed on achieving one objective that we don’t fully consider the knock on effects of what we do.  I’m sure the team responsible for the rewards offers had no intention of continually reminding me that there is still a space in my home where my cat used to be. When you’re implementing a new initiative or trying something different leave time to consider the unintended consequences as well as the intended ones. Talk to other teams about how what you’re doing may affect them and ask for their insight into how it could play out with customers in ways you haven’t anticipated. It may just help you avoid situations where you achieve your objective but create problems for someone else along the way.

Source: Carolyn Schofield, 29 August 2024