It hasn’t been an easy time for brands recently. Consumers — driven in part by a wonky economy that has sent them in search of emotional connection as a reason to buy — are exercising more control over choice than ever before, and are completely comfortable asking brands to show them the meaning. Add into the mix the factors of media fragmentation and the increased digital literacy of consumers, and the resulting equation and its solution look like this:
This solution is not the one that brands wanted, but it’s the one they face. An examination of 80 categories and nearly 600 brands in our Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index found that attributes relating to experience, authentic innovation, and meaning have been exerting the strongest impact on category architectures, consumer expectations, decision making, and brand engagement. These attributes then become stunningly important inputs into how consumers decide which brands to engage with and remain loyal to, and — more important — which brands reach that promised land of delight. They are the benchmarks by which consumers define brand greatness.
This equation for brand-to-consumer emotional connection has been actualizing for some time now. Its foundations began in the early 1990s when process engineering, educated consumers, and the Internet dramatically changed the way consumers approached brands. The inputs that make up that same equation have been shifting in content and accelerating in terms of their impact on brand perceptions. Brands and brand value have increasingly been defined not through the narrow lens of price, or the even narrower lens of satisfaction, but in terms of differentiating the experience that consumers have when they interact with a given brand, and a willing acknowledgment that the brand means something to them.
This here’s-what-I-expect-from-a-great-brand paradigm shift has had even more powerful effects on what consumers really expect and what brand satisfaction means to them. Customer satisfaction alone is certainly not dead, but it has ceased to be a differentiator. Really. No matter how many awards a brand can point to, consumers take a brand for granted if it offers only satisfaction. Satisfaction is table stakes.
But a variable more conspicuous and pernicious virtually guarantees that consumers will leave you if you don’t have it.
Consumers seek delight. They actively look for it, they know it when they see it, and they celebrate it with purchases, great word-of-mouth, and very profitable and loyal behavior. Consumers have always wanted to be delighted. The difference now is that they expect it. Just ask Apple.
Technology is responsible for driving some of that expectation. Technology gave us the customized life: our handhelds telling us where to get the best Thai food in an unknown neighborhood, keeping our music saved and sorted for the soundtracks of our moods, letting us order shoes and send them back without any financial repercussion. Our delight with technology did not stay put, however. It leaked into other aspects of our lives. Consumers asked, “If I can download an app to tweak photos on the fly, how come I can’t move the payment date for my credit card without going into voicemail jail and repeating my card number three times?” See how it works?
Consumers have not only learned to expect more; the great brands have taught them to expect more. The rapidly increasing wow factor in technology has added a multiplier effect as well. Great brands are able to transform products, services, outreach, and meaning to deliver on those increased consumer expectations. Brands that are able to meet — even exceed — these expectations can be called “great” brands. This only matters, of course, if you are keeping score by counting sales and profits and not merely tracking awareness levels, numbers of YouTube views, or the length of the list of friends a brand has on Facebook. Yes, price is a variable, but in the this-is-what-I-expect-if-you-want-to-delight-me mind-set of the postmodern consumer, price is not the deciding factor or even the most important part of the decision. If it were, there would be no luxury brands, or all those perfectly good mp3 players in iPod owners’ junk drawers.
No, it’s not price: it is value — the most leveragable of which is emotional value, best exemplified via experience or instilled meaning. The good news is that delight does not come in one size. It has as many manifestations as there are categories for the consumer to approach. To understand that, we need to get outside the brand and look at the world from the consumers’ point of view, which is always a category perspective.
The most important category drivers that create loyalty, engagement, and delight are best characterized as consumer experience and meaning drivers, not as features. Great brands don’t rely on features alone to provide experience and meaning — not in this century.
The best way brands can approach understanding the consumers’ category perspective is by understanding the consumer Ideal. That’s each consumer’s rational and emotional view of the category in which the brand competes. “Rational” is the easy part. “Emotional” is something entirely different, reaching beyond imagery and well beyond impulse buying. Great brands know that abstract brand imagery is an extraordinarily poor stand-in for a relatable customer experience or resonating brand meaning, and consumers are now more cautious about empty imagery than at any time in marketing history.
Identifying true emotional drivers lets brands understand how consumers really view, compare, and choose among category options and what might believably represent those values. Brands need to know everything they can about the Ideal that consumers hold, because consumers don’t just think: they wish, they dream, they want. All those things make up what an Ideal is; consumers have them, and their expectations about them grow stronger every day.
Great brands want to understand all they can about the Ideal because it can be used to explain and plan for how consumers behave. It provides a roadmap to understanding what makes loyalty, engagement, differentiation, and meaning actually happen. Knowing what awareness and satisfaction already exist is helpful in tracking where a brand has been, but is not very useful in pointing to where it should go, based on meanings that might resonate more highly with its target audiences.
Great brands pursue the Ideal because that’s where real decision making takes place. On the surface level, this pursuit involves (a) approaching the category, (b) organizing category information, and (c) experiencing some form of brand engagement. In the rational world, the conscious part of that process looks like this:
1. I need/want (fill in the blank with any category)
2. Go to the store/aisle/webpage
3. Choose a brand
4. How much does it cost?
Ah, if it were that simple. Maybe such simplicity existed in the middle of the last century, but no longer. Now the emotional and unconscious processes kick in:
1. What does my Ideal (fill in the blank) “look” like — emotionally and rationally?
2. Aggregating everything I feel and know about the brands on an articulated, unarticulated, and gut basis, which brand in the category come closest to my Ideal?
3. The brand that best meets or exceeds my expectations for the Ideal is the brand for me!
4. I am being delighted and getting value.
Today, great brands measure, understand, and leverage the Ideal because it tells them what is most important and where the highest expectations lie. Managed properly, that approach brings delight.
Most consumers likely could not articulate the process we outlined, but in trying to do so, they would begin using emotional language, doing their best to answer. Direct questioning, though, can only go so far. That’s why real emotional metrics are so key in today’s consumer marketplace. Without them, brands are left with an incomplete picture of decision making and, by extension, an incomplete response. Brands take many strategic and tactical actions in an attempt to create delight, and great brands are successful at doing just that. But consumers only experience delight when those actions the brand takes matter enough to actually engender the delight for consumers. A high degree of pleasure and enjoyment can, after all, only come from a high-stakes need. Otherwise the best you end up with is satisfaction.
The opposite of delight is neither satisfaction nor dissatisfaction. In today’s brandscape, with consumers tethered (hardwired or wirelessly) to the Internet and with text messaging accounting for the bulk of smartphone usage, dissatisfaction is the new exit sign. The opposite of delight isn’t something loud like consumer anger or a raging blog post. It’s much worse than that. It’s disappointment, which can easily go unnoticed until a great brand, a delightful brand, makes the gap clear by jumping ahead of the pack. It’s the realization of the Russian proverb, “Delight and disappointment can grow on one stalk.”
That’s why smart brands pursue the Holy Grail of delight. They know dissatisfaction as the quiet killer it actually is, and want to guard against it by being the source of delight in their category — before another brand shows them, and consumers, what delight looks like.
At a time when brands seek ways to profitably engage consumers, delight serves as a real and predictive benchmark for marketers. Brands that respond with a truly consumer-centric view of their category and meet or exceed the Ideal ultimately delight their customers and prospects.
The poet Gerald Massey wrote, “Not by appointment do we meet delight.” Poetic, yes, but not accurate when it comes to today’s reality. Great brands know that “by appointment” is the only way to create delight if they and not their competitors are going to be the ones to meet it.
