ExperienceCurve

“the experience is the brand” is a phrase often used to describe how a customer’s experience with an organization will influence their perception of the brand. But I see the customer experience as being a culmination of brand building activities, it is the point at which a customer has decided they trust your company enough to engage in some kind of trial behavior, in other words, even before the customer experience’s your organizations products and services they have established some kind of expectation in their mind. And expectation of quality, attitude, performance… experience if you like. So the experience is a culmination of expectation being measured against experience.

This balance between expectation and experience is why I like to think of a brand as a promise, and the customer experience as the fulfillment of that promise. No doubt a customer experience that veers wildly from it’s brand promise will erode my belief in that brand promise pretty quickly. Companies that promise one thing through their advertising and branding and badly let us down through the customer experience are undermining a huge investment and one of their most valuable assets. The difference between a brand promise and the actual customer experience is the “experience gap”, and that will erode your brand equity faster than anything else, no one likes to be promised one thing and delivered another.

Any company that wants to establish a customer experience strategy must do it with a full and realistic evaluation of what their brand stands for and what their brand promise is. Any company that fails to align their customer experience strategy with their brand strategy will be in danger of creating an “experience gap” that will erode any brand equity they have built in the marketplace.