The Experience Effect: Engage Your Customers with a Consistent and Memorable Brand Experience

by Jim Joseph

Overview

The overall experience of the buying process ultimately determines whether consumers will pay money for a product or service: they weigh what they are purchasing with their responses to the marketing message, the advertising, the sales approach, the website, the interaction with company personnel, and more. Jim Joseph calls the ideal combination these elements the “experience effect.” In this book, he shows how any business can create one for its brand to ensure customers leave satisfied. The Experience Effect does this by teaching readers how to understand their brand’s target audience, conduct more effective market research, connect with customers on an emotional level, establish appropriate and engaging customer touchpoints, link digital and nondigital media, and perform a gap analysis of their brands’ marketing. Filled with practical advice and real-life examples, this insightful guide helps companies of any type and size coalesce the varied elements of their business into a seamless consumer experience that resonates deeply, builds brand loyalty, and keeps customers coming back.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814415559
Publisher:	AMACOM
Publication date:	05/19/2010
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	952,949
File size:	458 KB

About the Author

JIM JOSEPH (New York, NY) is an award-winning marketing professional who specializes in building consumer brands. His client experience includes blockbuster brands like Kellogg's, Kraft, Cadillac, Tylenol, Clean Clear, and Wal-Mart.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION: Marketing Is a Spectator Sport—Observing, Learning, and Then Applying

We interact with brands all the time, whether we consciously realize it or not. Some brands we’ve been loyal to for years (like a favorite shampoo or pair of jeans), and some we are just discovering for the very first time (like a new enhanced water drink or a new electronic device). Some we don’t even know are brands (like our favorite singer or a local restaurant)! Our interactions can run the gamut from amazing to just okay to disappointing to completely horrible.

Like clicking on a banner ad that takes you to a website where you find the perfect item you didn’t even realize you wanted, in a cool color you didn’t even realize existed, and discovering that it comes with free shipping—coincidently only on orders placed that day! Pretty amazing. Or stopping at your favorite coffee shop a noticing that it’s a lot messier than it used to be, getting the wrong flavor added to your usual coffee drink, and then being charged 67

cents more than usual. Very disappointing.

These kinds of interactions are our personal experiences with brands, and they completely shape our perceptions. They influence our feelings about the brand, good or bad, whether we realize it or not. These experiences define our thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors toward brands and the value that they bring to our lives.

In a sense, how we experience the brand, how we feel the brand, and how we choose to interpret the brand actually becomes the brand to us. This is The Experience Effect, and throughout the book we’ll be exploring the effect that brand experiences have on consumers.

At the crux of good marketing is the conscious and methodical process of determining exactly the kind of brand to offer consumers and exactly the kind of experience to create for them—and then developing it consistently across every facet of the marketing plan: from obvious marketing elements like packaging and advertising a to the not so obvious elements like customer service representatives a the CEO’s weekly blog, or a branded Twitter presence.

The essence of good marketing is creating a consistent brand experience with each specific consumer interaction.

In The Experience Effect, I will walk you through that conscious and methodical process step by step, chapter by chapter. By the end, we will have mapped out a consistent and ownable brand experience for the entire marketing plan.

We will also be exploring a lot of examples here. Some of the examples will be personal, and some observational. Some we’ll explore in depth, and others will be brief mentions to help make a point. I love looking at and analyzing examples of good and bad marketing, and you’ll get a load of them in this book. Marketplace examples help bring to life the principles of marketing that are otherwise left to theory. When we observe marketing theory applied in the real world to real brands, we can learn from both the successes and mistakes of others and apply what we’ve learned to our own marketing challenges.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Foreword: Thoughts from Two Icons, vii

Foreword: “Just Stick It Between Your Legs,” xi

Acknowledgments, xvii

Introduction: Marketing Is a Spectator Sport: Observing, Learning, and Then Applying, 1

Prologue: The Experience Effect in Action: Two Personal Examples, 7

1 Buzzwords Need Not Apply: Defining the Experience Effect, 15

2 Best Pasta in Town: Positioning the Experience Effect, 27

3 Brand Soundtrack: Making the Right Decisions for the Brand, 39

4 Not by Numbers Alone: Understanding the Brand’s Target Audience, 57

5 Kiss a Few Babies: Constructing a Consumer Profile, 73

6 Get Emotional: Connecting with Customers on Multiple Levels, 89

7 Reach Out and Touch: Mapping Effective and Engaging Touchpoints, 99

8 Squishees from Kwik-E-Mart: Activating Touchpoints, 115

9 Avoiding the Cookie Cutter: Creating Unique Touchpoints, 129

10 Meet Martha, Louis, and Some Elves: Finding Inspiration, 141

11 Madonna and Tide: Learning from Celebrities, 151

12 Everyone Else Bring Data: Researching the Experience Effect, 163

13 A Flash of Color: Owning the Experience Effect, 175

14 Mind the Gap: Assessing What’s Missing on the Brand, 191

15 A Room with a View: Keeping the Team on Track, 201

Afterword: Click-Through: Making It Real, 213

Index, 215

About the Author, 221

Editorial Reviews

"He will make you think and change how you act and for a marketing book that is the ultimate praise." —DTC Perspectives

"The Experience Effect takes marketers through every step of constructing an experience that expresses a clear, meaningful brand impression and then reinforces it with each customer interaction....Based on real marketplace examples and results, The Experience Effect leads the way to securing customer loyalty, touchpoint by touchpoint, interaction by interaction, person by person." —Retail Observer

From the Publisher