Every Touchpoint Tells a Story…
Touchpoints.
They tell stories. Some big, some small, but together they define the brand.
Marketers need a clear, coherent, and positive picture of the brand to emerge from them.
Why touchpoints have become so important
Three main changes have brought touchpoints to the frontline of branding:
Advertising has become less effective in defining a brand. The explosion of content, the fragmentation of media and of audiences, and increasing media clutter have all conspired to make it difficult for advertising to gain and hold people’s attention.
The number of touchpoints has increased dramatically. People now have far more ways to find out about and interact with a brand. Some of these touch the brand directly, such as social channels, chatbots, and notifications. But there’s also a multitude of indirect touch points, where people can hear about other people’s experiences of the brand, including review platforms, social media, and employee feedback sites.
Search made it easy to surface information about the brand, without receiving any direct communication from it. And now Generative AI can effectively pull on everything that’s known about the brand to answer a single prompt.
A brand has become the sum of its touchpoints.
Brand-building is now about orchestration
However, making sure all these touchpoints reflect the brand takes marketers far beyond their comfort zone.
For a start, touchpoints are not all controlled by Marketing. Nearly every department of the business is involved, either directly or through decisions made that impacts a touchpoint. But these all need to be co-ordinated.
Second, many touchpoints are delivered by employees. Employees are people, and people can’t be programmed and polished like a carefully crafted piece of communication. They need to be inspired to naturally deliver the brand.
Then, there’s the need to take a broader view of business priorities. At Tesco, I remember championing investment in warehouse extensions as a key priority for the business, to improve the availability of products on the shelves for customers. This was far more important for the brand than any Marketing initiatives we wanted to spend on.
Rather than just working with agencies, marketers now need to inspire, orchestrate, and support the entire business to deliver the brand.
The failed promise of the peak-end rule
For a time, the peak-end rule, discovered by Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Fredrickson, seemed to offer marketers a simple way of managing touchpoints.
The peak-end rule states that people judge experiences largely by how they felt at the peak moments of pleasure or pain and at the end, rather than through the total sum of the experience. So, this suggested that marketers could focus their attention on the brand delivering one or two memorable moments and a smooth positive ending, rather than trying to influence every touchpoint.
Sadly, I never found this worked in practice.
When researching supermarket shopping trips with customers, there was little consistency in their peak or end experiences. They varied from customer to customer, but also for the same customer from trip to trip. For example, on one trip the peak was talking with a really friendly and helpful employee, on the next having to use a really dirty restroom. While the end could be a leaked product in a shopping bag at home rather than an efficient checkout experience.
Certainly, touchpoints were not equal, but neither were they predictable. In the end, we found it necessary to consider every interaction as contributing to or taking away from the positive brand memories that we were trying to build. As Disney puts it, “everything speaks”.
Build a business culture that lives the brand
So, the challenge remains how to ensure that a clear, coherent, and positive picture of the brand emerges across all the potential touchpoints that people can have with the brand.
Maybe grab some tools? There are a myriad of them that claim to help. And now with AI, there’s the potential for optimizing the experience for each customer. But they’re just tools. A hammer can be a craftsmen’s tool, but it can also be wielded as a weapon. What matters is the intention behind it.
For the brand to emerge across multiple touchpoints, the business and its employees need to be living the brand, so that they naturally act and make decisions that reflect it. This means embedding the brand into the culture of the business.
How to do this? I focused on four key steps:
Be clear what the brand stands for
Center the brand on improving people’s lives in some way, so that it can inspire employees. This needs to be directly connected to what the brand does, rather than some generic statement, so that it makes sense to employees (and to customers). Add a clear set of values to live by. These should reflect a brand that is fair and does the right thing, to create a sense of pride and guide behaviors.
Hardwire the brand into the business
Flow the brand through everything that the business does: its products and services, policies and processes, communications and KPIs. This aligns the business to deliver the brand. In particular, it’s helpful to build the brand into job descriptions, so that every employee can see how their particular role makes a contribution.
Enable people to deliver
Even if the work feels meaningful, employees need to be equipped to deliver for customers. Give them autonomy to get on and do what’s needed, backed up with training so that they can master the skills required. Ensure the policies and processes of the business are lined up to enable them to deliver.
Build Feedback Loops
Put feedback loops in place across all touchpoints, capturing the voices of customers and employees, so that the business can continually make improvements in delivering for customers.
Finally, underpinning all this is a fundamental leadership issue. In a world where every touchpoint tells a story, the brand becomes a way of doing business, not just a device for persuading customers to buy. The leadership has to embrace, model, and reinforce this, so that the brand becomes the code that connects the direction, behaviors, and operations of the business.
Then, and only then, will the story that emerges be the story of the brand…
