RadiantBrands: How Customers Craft Brands

June 2009 E-NEWS
from Steven Donaldson and Michael Zinke, the Brand Guys

Shaping customer experience in a multi-channel world — creative, print, web, new media Radiant sends these brand insights to help you build value, uniqueness and loyalty for your brand. In business, your brand's critical differentiation helps your customers find you, remember you and come back to you.

In this issue:

Brand Experience: How Customers Craft Brands
It's their experience and they expect you to follow. Trader Joe's, Amazon, Flip Video, BMW Mini — these brands all live in and are shaped by the experience that customers seek.
Auto industry disaster or brand opportunity?
With the sale of Chrysler to Fiat and the splitup of GM brands, is everything going down hill or are new brands being born?
Radiant Work: The Whitewater Group
Promoting the unique value of a corporate training program provider.

Brand Experience: How Customers Craft Brands

It's their experience and they expect the brand to follow. Trader Joe's, Amazon, Flip Video, BMW Mini — these brands all live in and have allowed their brand to be shaped by the experience that customers seek. A quick overview:

Know Your Customer

Trader Joe's evolved over time to become a customer-driven mini-grocery store — uniquely so. They consistently focus on the "foody" customer who seeks higher quality and more unusual, "gourmet" experiences, tastes and foods, but inexpensively and in a friendly, down-to-earth atmosphere.

Find the Missing Experience

Flip Video is a unique, small hand-held video camera created in a market literally glutted with complex, expensive, feature-driven digital camcorders. Pure Digital, the makers of Flip Video, saw a market for a small, simple, inexpensive (under $100) video camera with limited features and a pop-out USB plug that instantly uploads your videos to send to colleagues, friends and family.

Brand a Channel to Everything

Amazon is the "find everything and compare it store online". It still ranks close to number one in online merchandising experience by consumers. Almost everyone uses it to compare products and you can shape your choices, save your selections and always come back. And, they know they could miss you in a second if they don't do it right.

Creating a Moving Experience

The BMW Mini — a car totally created for an experience. The recreation of a 40-year-old small car, updated with the handling and technology for those who love driving. One focus, one experience that's all about what you do in the car, not just what it looks like. Everyone knows the Mini. It's all about a unique driving experience. Their ads communicate this with simple, subtle reflections on what's unique about the brand.

Consumers Look for Clues — Give it to 'em

Traditional advertising and media bombards the consumer with creative pitches that are kitschy and fun but may not be relevant to the needs or motivations of customers. Give them the clues to value they're looking for.

Why Ad Campaigns Often Don't Work

Inflicting repetitive creative campaigns on consumers that are attention-getting and generally irrelevant does not drive loyalty — it numbs consumers to any experience of your brand. It may get your attention but data shows that it may not motivate behavior. With so many choices for consumers, they are necessarily guided by their desires and their needs, not your approach. Understanding and measuring customer desires and experience helps you drive loyalty. That's why you need to give customers the clues that tell them this is the right choice.

Consumer Brand Rules

Consumer's are motivated by real solutions to their unmet needs.
Consumer's seek consistent unifying experiences that identify and meet these needs.
Consumer's want affirming brand messages and symbols that verify they made the right choice.
Consumer's look for brand touchpoints that affirm their choices.
Consumer's respond to advertising that confirms this is "my brand".

Auto Industry Disaster or Brand Opportunity?

With the sale of Chrysler to Fiat and the split up of GM brands is everything going downhill or are new brands being born?

With Fiat's purchase of Chrysler, Saab being sold to a small Swedish customer car maker, Saturn sold to Penske the truck and auto rental empire and Hummer now owned by a Chinese truck maker, the auto world has been turned on its head. There is no question that sales of cars worldwide are down but this does not mean a collapse of these brands.

This change is not necessarily for the worse. In fact, these "new" brands are no longer a division of a larger company that imposes revenue and market share goals over customer satisfaction. Now they are real brands that need to discover what they really can be to their customers.

Driven by a new sense of customer loyalty I expect these brands will revisit everything from sales, to customer service to product mix. Understanding the connection between the brand and loyalty can only help them rediscover growth in responding to specific segments of the market. Who knows? Hummer may come out with a fuel-efficient hybrid or small jeep-like vehicle. Saturn may reinvent the entire dealership model and continue to find a unique niche of loyalty with customers, and Chrysler may develop some of the sportiest small cars on the road in two years.

It just means more selection for the consumer and better value for everyone.

Radiant Work: The Whitewater Group

Promoting the unique and relevant offerings
of a corporate training provider

The Whitewater Group is a management consulting organization focused on improving performance for companies and organizations. Radiant had created the last version of their web site as well as a new identity and positioning. Now, 3 years later, the site needed a refresh. Radiant worked closely with Whitewater to develop compelling content on the home page that would speak to different market segments and point potential customers to the offerings that were right for them.

The new web site design also encourages prospects to engage with Whitewater through performance and efficiency assessment tools and explore book recommendations and case studies that position Whitewater as a thought leader.