Brands play a significant role in the lives of their customers. From providing goods and services to achieving top-of-the-mind recall, brands must be sure their audience knows they are reliable. Brands have a communal and exchange relationship with their customers, establishing if the customer will come back, talk about the brand, or have a one-time experience. Either way, businesses should select a two-way communication route to benefit both parties.
What people most want is for someone to listen to them. This experience may be why people will still return to you to make a purchase when you mess up an order but are willing to accept the mistake and put the customer’s query first. This attitude may come up, just as with interpersonal relationships; if you show people you care about and value them, they will return the gesture by being your brand’s advocate, and brands can use positive word of mouth in their favor.
Defining a Brand-Customer Relationship
Brands willing to have successful, positive relationships with their clients must first understand and visualize the journey and touchpoints the consumers will go through and form a basic framework. Putting themselves in the customers’ shoes will help them identify consumer needs, and once they have their foot in the door, bingo! They have earned their way to the customer’s trust.
From this point on, all brand teams must keep pushing with consistent quality and customer service. In no time, they will become the brand of choice to one consumer and other people who hear and talk about the brand from one person. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool brands have in their toolshed to use wisely to get to where they want with their customers.
Furthermore, once your customer trusts you, the second part of your journey begins: brand loyalty. Often, brands underestimate the power of brand loyalty. If your product is of superior quality and your services are consistent, you can assure your audience will stick with you. However, suppose any of the two aspects mentioned above go off balance.
In that case, brands should fear losing not just one but a whole group of customers because of negative brand advocacy.
Brand Relationship Management
When brands make consumers experience enhancement in their core competency, they have nothing to fear. “Customer is King” is a mantra that brands should not only believe but also preach. A customer-centric approach will put you ahead of your competition, giving you a competitive edge that is hard to crack. Think about Coca-Cola as a brand. Because of its consistency of quality and consumer-based advertisement approach, it has an established name in the market that even Pepsi often comes in second.
Once you have set the user experience as a priority for your brand, putting the team accordingly is the next step you must focus on. Working in the service sector takes a lot of understanding, patience, and commitment; hence, you must put in time and effort to build a team ready to represent you in the way you want. Often, brands outsource service efforts to agencies that do not share the brand vision or mission, resulting in a loss of customers and a reduced audience base.
You can invest heavily in data collection programs, audience determination tools, and even the best sales team. Still, if audience insight results are not scaled appropriately, you will eventually make negative returns even on your expectations. Creating a strong operations team, training the correct people, and delivering consistently on consumer needs are critical to establishing the brand in a customer’s eyes. It is important to remember that the culture you create with your brand and its people will trickle down to the customer who interacts with the brand.
Conclusion
Consumers want a two-way relationship with brands, and sometimes, even they do not know this. For brands to sit well with their audiences, they must ensure the entire customer journey from when they initially encounter the brand to when they buy their product. Audience service must ensure no inconvenience.
Customers will remember their experience with the brand regarding how the sales team treated them at the store, the convenience of online shopping, refund policies on products, and customer treatment throughout their interaction with the brand. Businesses must remember the importance of consistently delivering on the promises they make to their customers. Brand managers must set year-round strategies around the needs of their customers and then create a corporate mission and culture to achieve these goals.
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