[MUSIC] Hi, welcome back. We're now in week three, and you're more than halfway through the course. So last week, we saw how brand strategy made its way into various touch points during the awareness phase, and through activities such as print and video advertisements and branded content on social media. We saw ways that brand guidelines can make a bigger impact than they typically do along many phases of the customer journey. We also covered the value of customer experience metrics projects. This week is the week where we really get into the meat of how brands should impact customer experience. To do this, we're going to first take a step back. Recall that from Maria's course that the brand strategy really starts with positioning and differentiation. It, of course, makes sense that the main positioning and differentiation messages should find their way into every touch point, even when the focus of the touch point is down to, maybe, future attributes. But the reality is different. In many of the different touch points the brand messages get watered down or even can be replaced by other, sometimes conflicting messages. We already spoke about, specifically, brand guidelines, how they can struggle to find their way into many of the touch points. But it's also true that some companies struggle to infuse the general brand messaging, reinforcing positioning and differentiation across different touch points. So why does this happen? It's simple, the brand messaging is always competing with other departments in individual priorities and their different incentives. This happens all the time across all the customer journey touch points and this is mostly due to incentives that are not aligned with the brand messages. So Brandon has built on the concept of trust, must build that trust with each and every interaction. Violating their trust can happen at any given touch point along the customer journey. The billing department that has optimized to cut costs and automate, but not to reinforce a trustworthy interactions. The legal department that approves a sale of customer data to third parties, that doesn't really build trust. The post sales department, which is incentivized to make sales quotas, even if it means selling additional products to customers who will never use them. These don't build trust. One company I worked with promoted the idea of ease of use for it's marketing software. Ease of use was an important component of the brand message that the software enabled non techie marketers, non technical people, to become digitally savvy. Yet there are huge usability problems in the software. The product management team not only knew this but they purposely ignored the customer complaints about the problems with ease of use, why? Because, despite the brand promise, the product managers were incentivized to deliver new features, not easy to use features. The industry analysts, they were very influential in making people buy the products. They had been criticizing the software products, not for ease of use, but for missing key features. So instead of fixing usability problems and reinforcing the brand message, the product team built new features, constantly built new features that can be used to make deals with new customers. For anyone who's worked in different departments, this tension between brand messages and department and individual incentives in their context, is really critical. You may have a well researched, powerful, and clearly articulated brand strategy, but when the teams that are managing customer touch points don't follow the same brand strategy, it's not just a missed opportunity. It is likely that the brand is being eroded by alternative message being communicated, either explicitly or implicitly, by other teams and departments. In the next classes we're going to get introduced some new ways of looking at and, hopefully, addressing the challenges of injecting brand messages across the entire customer journey. I'll see you next time. [MUSIC]
