in associationwith
marketing
Mapping the whole customer experience and themany touch points with which customers interact with your brand and aligning the marketing promise with what’s actually delivered has never been more important, product innovation and customer experience expert Gus Desbarats tells Grainne Rothery
All in themind
It may sound obvious, but understanding, mapping and trying to continuously improve the entire experience where people may be interacting with your brand is becoming increasingly important, particularly as the number of touch points in the customer journey expands. And it’s one of the cornerstones of good mar- keting, says Gus Desbarats, chairman of The Alloy UK, who has been focused on bringing better user experi- ences and professional brand marketing into high-tech industries, and on the evolution of innovation best prac- tice, for a number of years. “You have to think about the whole experience that
your customers have with the service proposition you’re making,” he says. “You really have to think more care- fully and do more for your audience. It’s about excel- lence. The companies that are getting this right, the BMWs and even the Apples of this world, they’re people that really run their innovation projects from the cus- tomer perspective and they invest up front to discover how their customers will be interacting with the prod- uct, emotionally as well as practically. “The ones who get it right, say: ‘What is my customer
journey? I’mgoing tomapmy customer journey. I’mgoing to work out the thousands of ways the customer interacts withmy business, through everything fromhow I look on the shelf to my website, to the product when they first use it, to how they use it in extreme circumstances. And I’m going to work out what I need to do to deliver a good experience in all those circumstances’.” According to Desbarats, a company’s marcoms strat-
egy must connect the delivery with the promise. “The days of making marketing promises that were just about an aspiration and didn’t actually follow through on the detail are long gone,” he says. “Customers more and more are looking at brands and asking: ‘What are you
Summer 2011 Irish Director 47
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