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Brand Leadership And Customer Experience Management

By Professor KC Chan, Dr Christopher Goh, Dr Colin Koh

Brand leadership has become a very important concept for companies in the continual battle to retain the most profitable customers.

The essence of business and marketing strategy is to achieve brand leadership by carefully segmenting, specifically targeting and mindfully positioning to one’s key account customers, i.e. applying The 80/20 Golden Rule where 20 percent of the customers contribute to 80 percent of the sales revenue. Operationally, it is essential to ensure that customer touch points (or pain points) stay within the tolerance limit, ranging from satisfaction to delight, i.e. The 90/10 Excellent Service Rule where 90 percent of customer’s experience is controllable and only 10 percent is uncontrollable. To manage customer experience is to manage and appeal to the five senses of the customer at the touch points. The “brand” as sensory experience or Experiential Marketing is the buzzword of marketers today.

Brand Leadership

Figure 1. Elements of Brand Leadership

The framework for brand leadership is depicted in Figure 1. The four elements are:

• Brand Awareness (Through sponsorship events)
  Visa for Olympics; Nike for NBA; Samsung for World Cup; Marlboro for Formula 1. Brand awareness is not what a company thinks it is. The onus is on the customers. It is what the customers say it is. It is the recollection of the customers that matters.
• Brand Association (Attributes of the product/service)
  Volvo for safety; Nike for performance; FedEx for guaranteed overnight delivery; Hallmark for caring. Brand association is the positioning of the brand name in the minds of the customers. BMW for “Sheer Driving Pleasure” is the tagline outside of the US. But in the US, the original tagline stays as “The Ultimate Driving Machine”. Brand association is what the customers want to associate themselves with in terms of the unique selling proposition of the product/service.
• Brand Loyalty (Customer retention)
  To maintain customers’ loyalty to the brand, it is imperative to give them incentives by showing gestures of appreciation. Commercial airlines join forces to form alliances, e.g. Star Alliance, Asia Miles, One World, Sky Team. Frequent flyers who stick with those airlines “under one roof” are awarded points, which can be used to redeem free or upgraded class seats, e.g. from Economy to Business Class. They also enjoy the right to the use VIP lounges at airports around the world.
• Brand Experience (Touch points)
  Brand experience is highly correlated with self-image. See classification below:
  • Actual Self: How an individual sees himself/herself in relation to the brand.
  • Ideal Self: How an individual would like to see himself/herself in relation to the brand.
  • Social Self: How an individual feels others see himself/herself in relation to the brand.
  • Ideal Social Self: How an individual would like others to see himself/herself in relation to the brand.

Positioning is the effort to connect brand association with brand experience. Examples of brand positioning are given below:

Customer Experience Management

In actuality, brand awareness, brand association, brand loyalty and brand experience are reinforced during the critical moment of truth when the customer’s experiences the brand and compares it to his/her expectation. This experience is essentially via the five senses.

The Sense of Smell (Atmospheric)
For furniture, smell plays a critical role in influencing the decision of a customer. The type of shellac, the different types of wood, leather, lining, etc, that is used for internal and external finishes.

The Sense of Sound (Auditory)
For furniture, the “solid” or “hollow” sound of the wood can influence the decision of a customer. Obviously, for leather and fabric finishes the effect of sound plays a less critical role to influence the buying behaviour.

The Sense of Sight (Visual)
The aesthetic value of the furniture design, whether wood, leather, cane, bamboo or fabric, with the contemporary colour scheme and its accessories, play a vital role in influencing the buying behaviour. Often, aesthetic value includes mobility. For example, the concept of Ikea Furniture is that it can be assembled and disassembled according to the needs of the user.

The Sense of Taste (Aesthetic)
For furniture, “taste” is related to the theme of Rosewood Classic, Victorian, Zen, Balinese; Eastern or Western theme or the fusion of East and West design concept for home furnishing. Furnishings for kitchen, living room, dining room and reading room are vastly different in taste and design.

The Sense of Touch (Tactile)
For furniture, the softness or hardness of a product should suit the preferences of the user. For example, luxury lines of bedding and cushions are made using goose and synthetic down that the touch feels so comfortable that he/she can fall asleep within five to 10 minutes after relaxing on the sofa.

The future of marketing depends on three critical factors, i.e. aesthetics, emotions and experiences. Emotional and aesthetic aspects are becoming more and more important for the experience of a brand. In experiential marketing, the five human senses are stimulated to offer a holistic experience. See below.

To be sure, brand leadership and customer experience management connect branding as “a positioning within the five human senses”. Finally, the sixth sense of customer intuition would alert marketers to take cognisance of “The Soul of Sensory Marketing” to stay competitive and profitable.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Professor Dr K C Chan had over 25 years of senior management experience covering agricultural, industrial as well as commercial products and services. Specifically, he led the turnover project in one of the largest conglomerates in Indonesia during the economical crisis beginning 1997.

Dr Chan is also a corporate trainer. He has been actively teaching for the past 20 years on a part-time basis. He is today the Founding Director at the Centre for Professional Training and Development Pte Ltd.

Dr Chan had been visiting Professor to Southeast Asian universities for their EMBA degree and senior executive programmes. He was a visiting Professor to the University of Glasglow, Department of Business & Management, for a tenure of five years before being conferred a Distinguished Professor in Action Learning in 2003 by IMCA (UK) for the original and pragmatic concept of the ‘Management by Olympic System through Integrative Leadership’.

Dr Christopher Goh has worked in the banking industry for the past 22 years of which 13 years were at senior management levels. He has more than five years of heading the credit structuring and wealth management advisory department serving High-Net-Worth clients throughout the Asia Pacific region.

Goh had conducted many corporate seminars over the past decade, mainly focused on Structured Products, Credit Derivatives, Financial Derivatives, Portfolio Construction, Banking Operations, Valuation Strategies on financial products and risk management. He has also been actively lecturing in various banking and finance subjects at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels for a number of Australian and British universities in Singapore for the past 10 years. He is Visiting Professor at the Harbin Institute of Technology, China, lecturing on “Financial Markets and Financial Tools” to its EMBA students and also at S.P. Jain, Singapore Campus, lecturing on Wealth Planning for the EMBA students.

Dr Colin Koh is the President of the Continuing Professional Development Association and Assistant Honorary Secretary of Wholistic Learning Consortium. He is a Certified Master Coach and a NLP practitioner. Dr Koh holds a DPhil, Master Degree in International Business, Master Degree in Management and has many years of leadership and management experience in Non-Profit Organisations.