Comments Off on A Quick Definition of Brand Engagement
How do we define brand engagement? In this quick-fire article, we’ll try and digest the main goal of our involvement programmes in a quick and easy to understand way.
When we define anything, we start with an arbitrary literal definition, which usually gives us a nice starting point. To ‘engage’, as defined by the Collins English Dictionary, is to involve a person or his attention, engross, occupy, to promise to do something, to participate or to draw into conversation.
All of these definitions can be applied to brand engagement. In fact they encapsulate it’s four main goals – to catch attention, initiate a conversation, and then engross the customer with your brand promise. Overall, then brand engagement is the process of forming an http://buy-essays-cheap.com/buyessay-co-uk-review.
Brand engagement is a measure of how consumers perceive your brand, how well you have communicated your brand, and whether the experience of your brand stands up to the promises it makes.
Does your customer experience deliver on your brand promises? Brand engagement starts from within. Let us help your team deliver your brand by living its values internally.
‘How does a customer feel when they walk away?’ Experiences shape how customers feel about brands. 2015 is the year brand engagement got emotional.
Ad Age declared back in March that ‘ROI is dead. A new metric is needed for customer relationships.’ But how do you manage and measure emotions?
Customer experience is now the leading currency in business, and powerful tools exist, that can create personal and emotional relationships between brand and consumer. Brand engagement is won or lost on emotions, and customers crave a human, emotive element to their brand experience – we are feeling and emotional beings, us humans, after all.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou
The ability of brands to measure real, unarticulated and constantly expanding emotional customer expectations is where an advantage is won. Successful brands need to use authentic storytelling and position themselves meaningfully to appeal to emotional values of customers. They need to recognise that the experience and emotional investment of a customer is key. According to experts, in fact, emotions influence purchase behaviour far more than more quantifiable metrics like price and convenience, for example:
“Over the past decade, an abundance of psychology research has shown that experiences bring people more happiness than do possessions. Waiting for an experience apparently elicits more happiness and excitement than waiting for a material good ”
The key question, though, is how to you quantify or measure something so untangible, fragile and often internalised as emotion?
How Do You Measure Emotions?
“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.”
Simon Sinek
Customer experience is hard to measure. It’s based on emotions, which are notoriously elusive, subjective and unquantifiable. If you are to have any hope, you must take a holistic, involved approach to management and measurement. A single numeric rating can’t capture the entire story of a rich customer experience, after all.
When Ad Age declared that ROI was dead, there was a collective gasp all round as brand engagement and marketing professionals wondered how they were going to measure the success of their efforts. Well, Ad Age did offer an alternative – they called it ROE2 (return on experience x engagement). It’s what they called a ‘longer-term, holistic measure of consumers’ total brand experience and their level of engagement.’
The way Starbucks used technology to enhance the in-store experience and drive customer engagement and loyalty, is a good example. Customers could accumulate rewards via a mobile app or loyalty card and cash them in for a free drink or download a free track from iTunes using a Starbucks code. These are all effective ways to spark positive emotions, and measure them, too.
Mark Zawacki famously wrote that ‘Twitter has become the global claims court for bad customer service’, articulating the power social media has given to the masses. This is the new sounding board for customer emotions, and where they will communicate them, good or bad. Social media has provided a platform to manage enraged customers, but also champion the ecstatic ones and create stand-out experiences to get your customers excited and emotionally invested in your brand.
Customers feel a brand experience. So when creating one, you should be sensitive to how it will make your target audience feel, and the emotions it should evoke. Emotions grow out of experience. Emotion fuels engagement. Together they have a direct, measurable impact on brand engagement. As if you needed any more evidence than that, why not read more about how to utilise customer experience for a competitive edge, here.
Is the customer experience you deliver encouraging positive emotions towards your brand? Get in touch today to see how we can mobilise your brand advocates to appeal to customers’ values and emotions.