Carl Sarney

Where brand advertising is a promise made, CX ought to be a promise kept.

The brand promise should serve as a guiding light for the kind of customer experiences the brand will become famous for. This can also work in reverse. If you’re already delivering a remarkable experience, how do we make this well known through brand promotion?

And customer experiences should be fun! Make it easy for people to complete the job they came to your brand for, definitely. That’s the effective bit. Then look for opportunities to make the experience fun and entertaining. What’s the X factor in your experience people will want to tell others about?

To arrive at an effective fun CX strategy, I start by getting clear on the same important questions I’d look at for brand development:

• the business problem, what’s the from-to shift in commercial metrics the client needs?
•  the behaviour required, what do we need people to do in order to shift commercial metrics?
•  the prevailing perspective, what’s the current thinking that’s holding back progress?
•  the category, what category is the brand in and how do people compare it to competitors?
•  the product, price and place; is there any relative differentiation in what we’re selling?
•  the target, what’s important to them and how does that align with what we’re selling?
•  the cultural context, what influences people’s preferences and where’s this heading next?
•  the available experience channels, what’s in scope for the budget, what’s owned by the client, what channels could be earned, borrowed or stolen?

I’m looking for opportunities to elevate a customer experience from easily getting the job done once, to adding some fun entertainment in the right place that compels people to come back and to rave about it with others.

Let’s remember that fun and entertainment aren’t limited to joy and happiness. People pay good money to be freaked by horror movies and cry their eyes out at a gritty drama. What I’m looking for is an opportunity to engage your customer’s emotions in a way that aligns to the brand promise, doesn’t get in the way of the core job to complete and does make the experience memorable and worth talking about.

In the training module I teach for the Marketing Association on Behaviour Science for Customer Journeys, the first lesson is that to improve the ‘X’ first of all you have to understand the ‘C’; a customer, who is human, an imperfect social animal driven by survival instincts. This understanding helps me design experiences that work with human instincts, not against them.

I believe that you can’t count someone as a ‘customer’ unless your experience has got them ‘accustomed to’ using your brand every time they have a need for what you sell. The aim is to design an experience with positive reinforcement along the way, that gets people coming back.

The first time someone tries an experience, it’s and experiment, they’re taking a risk and can’t be certain of the outcome. If the experience pays off, they’re likely to try it again. Eventually they become an expert, and might start showing others your experience. And watch out, because if a competitor supersedes your experience, it will shift people’s expectations of the category, that’s why it’s best to be the leader who sets the expectations for the category.

Yes I’ll include classic journey mapping as part of the process, but that’s only one component of a broader idea map that makes clear how advertising will drive people to the experience, how the experience enables the sale/behaviour, and how we’ll get people coming back to the experience again and again. This part is typically done in collaboration with media and tech specialists.