Month: July 2019

Brands are like people; each has its own unique story. Whether these stories are creative or ordinary, exciting or boring, inspiring or meaningless, often depends on how they are told. There are many ways to tell the story of your brand, but inviting your customers to experience this story makes it stand out from the crowd.

Think about how many people and how many brands you interacted with since this morning. You got a cup of coffee, quickly checked your social media accounts,  glanced at items that were on display as you walked by shops and passed by cars waiting at the lights. You liked your coffee, you deleted one of the apps on your phone, the black pair of shoes in the store drew your attention, and you were amazed by the convertible car. In just half an hour, those brands continued their stories and intersected with yours.

Brands, like people, have their own stories that define them. What makes brands valuable is the connection that people feel toward their stories. Brand stories last throughout the lifetime of brands and brands that share the same values as their customers continue to write more success stories.

In today’s marketing strategies where emotional ties with customers are becoming more valuable, and where customer feedback can be taken instantaneously through social media, the course of a brand story can rapidly change. Therefore, in the era of digital marketing, brand story and brand experience have evolved into an inseparable whole.

Today, the brand story is not a story told in the distant past; it is broadcasted live as a single episode show. Presenting this show in a consistently engaging way for the current audience and all of the potential customers should be considered a priority for the brand marketing strategy. Otherwise, your loss of viewers can be irreversible.

What story to tell?

Mission and vision statements, which are written just for the sake of formality, don’t matter to your customers. Your customers should share your story, internalize it and voluntarily represent your brand everywhere. To make that happen, your audience should be able to experience your story. But how?

Your story should be realistic: No one expects you to write a saga. If a brand which has close ties to what people experience in real life shares their concerns and makes their customer happy, that proves that the brand is telling a genuine story. Unicorns or dragons can make your brand interesting, but an angry customer looking for your call center won’t be satisfied with the stardust in your story.

Your story should be unique: Your brand is, and so is your story. Although not strictly dependent on real life; the stories of brands that can transfer everyday events from a different perspective through a creative, fun or emotional framework are unique. What makes your brand one step ahead is to make your users a part of this original experience.

Your story should be continuous: Your brand may have been around for many years and may have many micro-stories that make up the macro, but that doesn’t mean you can’t add more. Nintendo was once producing cards, Shell was a seashells merchant, Peugeot was designing salt and pepper shakers… Stories grow and change with brands – and of course users – over time. Capturing change and keeping your story up to date is an important marketing goal.

Your story should be valuable: Dreams and realities must come together in your brand; your brand values ​​should be ones that can be embraced and defended by your customers. For example, if one of your values is being user-friendly, and while on your website, customers are overwhelmed by system errors, then the customer will begin to doubt your story. Similarly, a thermal power plant that claims to be eco-friendly most likely will not have many people who will embrace and defend their story.

Who’s the real hero?

The hero of your brand story is not the founder, company or product. The main hero is the user who experiences the story in their own way. The user experience is not only a digital interface but the combination of brand and customer behavior. Anyone who comes in contact with your brand, whether or not a customer, should be able to find something about themselves in your story, adopt your values ​​and turn into brand ambassadors, not just customers. This is a transformation that money cannot buy and it becomes a success story in itself.

What you do, what you sell or what you tell, are as valuable as the users can benefit from them. This benefit can be either material or intangible: the brand that offers the most innovative designs, the brand that sells at the most affordable prices and the brand that carries out the best social aid campaigns can have its name written in golden letters. There is not a single winner of the brand experience race for users, so you should focus on telling your brand story in the best way possible, not trying to be number 1.

What kind of experience should be designed?

There is always a story between brands and customers. It is the choice of brands to be a spectator as their stories are written or to become a good storyteller. The user experience will take place spontaneously, and the success of the brand in storytelling is to analyze these experiences thoroughly, to manage them, and to improve them as best they can. The user experience design does precisely that.

While marketing focuses on improving the marketability of products or services, experience design gives precedence to how better products and services can be used. Therefore, products and services with good user experience do their own marketing. When it comes to experience design, the user, product, brand and their interactions should be analyzed in depth.

Get to know the users: Meet with people who enjoy listening to your brand story; talk with real people who can make a connection with your brand, benefit from your products and services, do research on demographic characteristics and behaviors of your customers, create personas, identify contact points with your brand and focus on how you can mitigate the pain points by drawing customer experience journey maps. Do not separate the true heroes of the story from your focus.

Improve the experience: Carefully review your customers’ relationships with your brand. Keep in mind that customers who are unsatisfied with your product or services are more likely to raise their voices than the satisfied ones. First, try to lower these voices with reasonable solutions, then try to eliminate customer dissatisfaction before they occur and then make attempts to improve your existing customers’ experience even further. The methods you use to overcome these challenges and the solutions you produce will increase the value of your story.

Be innovative: In the beginning, we mentioned the importance of your story not being meaningless, ordinary, and boring. To this end, re-examine existing processes from an innovative and original perspective. Evaluate data from user surveys when developing new processes. Being creative does not mean you need to ‘rediscover America’ every time. Examine similar methods and best examples; get inspired by the most liked and most useful features of different products and services by users. Don’t forget to test your designs with real users who match your contacts.

Keep improving: The most important rule of being a good storyteller is to keep the listener’s attention alive. Make sure that your experience is able to do that and continues to that. Make sure that your updates on your product and service are based on feedback from your users. This does not mean that you have to implement every request of your users unconditionally. But it definitely doesn’t sound like a good idea to make a change that is not approved by the majority of your audience. Keep up to date with trends, content and visual design. Remember, there is no happy ending for your brand story; the most important thing is to keep the story going as long as possible.

Where should I begin?

Your brand’s story has already started with your brand. Maybe the brand was writing the first chapter of your story before you even gave it a name. You may not have customers yet, but you can analyze user research for your products and services.

One of the characteristics of marketing professionals and experience designers is their strong empathy. Put yourself in the place of your future users and try to anticipate their experiences as a customer. Optimize and consolidate potential processes while preparing your business plan.

Every detail in your story may not be written as you expect, but the more risks you can foresee, the more you can take measures. In that way instead of dealing with crisis management, you will be able to devote this time to improve your processes. You may encounter unexpected obstacles when you build your brand experience. Do not panic; there are surprises in every story, and it actually makes the story exciting. Don’t give up on your progress, your story will follow you.

The answer to this question depends mostly on your perspective. If you are a traditional salesperson, it might be useful to think that your customer is always right and to do everything to make them happy. However, if you are working on improving the products of your customer; you should get yourself – and your client – used to the idea that the customer might not be right, most of the time.

Since the late 19th century, when industrial production accelerated, and masses gained the ability to purchase more than their basic necessities, the need of manufacturers to create demand for their high supply brought about the concept, that is still popular: “The customer is always right.”.

Although the source is not known precisely, the idea that the customer is always right, which was made famous by the great pioneer store owners Marshall Field in Chicago and Harry Gordon Selfridge in London, and it has reached the present day. Moreover, it is localized and settled in French as “The customer is never wrong.”, in German as “The customer is king.”, in Japanese as “The customer is god.” and in Turkish as “The customer is the source of blessings.”.

Over the past century, the advancement in science and technology alongside the changing social and economic structures have made this principle rightly questionable. It became apparent in the business world’s complex dynamics that the customer was not always right. Yes, the customer was important, perhaps the essential part of the business, but to think that the customer demands are not questionable has brought many disasters for brands and service providers as well as the customers.

What does the customer want?

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Henry Ford

The saying of the industrialist Henry Ford, who brought revolutionizing innovations to the production processes, describes the limitations of the customer vision successfully. As well as innovation and change can come from apparent needs, offering customers more than their expectations is also a successful and profitable option.

If we think the issue from the perspective of the development and improvement of service providers, it is very reasonable and logical to care for the customers’ demands; and so you should do. . However, taking into account the demands of your customers without heuristic analysis and also reliable data analyzed by scientific methods might cause similar disasters for you and your clients.

In short, the customer always wants the best they know, not the best. Therefore, producing the better can also mean radically changing the values that the customer is strictly dependent on. If Ford had chosen to create what customers wanted instead of taking the risk of change, the Mustang name would not be a myth but referred to as a wild horse species unique to North America.

The rules of the team game

In a project which the customer expects your support, they also might expect being always right. It might be thought that they mostly are right because of knowing their potential, product, and the team better than you. Nevertheless, the professional management of the project by experts and the production of the analytical solutions based on data is undoubtedly more important than who is the right one.

Perhaps the smartest move that could be done when kicking off a project would be to reduce the number of the “sides”  to one.. To indigenize a common user-based mindset by integrating project owner, who is in charge of the project, with your team in all of the analysis, design and production stages will be the best and most efficient approach to the project.

Why is the customer not right?

If your customer does not think that you are on the same team, it means that you will spend most of your time to convince them of the work you have done, instead of doing your job. It is predictable how it might turn your project into long-term disaster.

Your customer is not the expert; on the contrary, they work with you because they need your expertise, experience, and perspective. Make sure a knowledgeable customer does not ask you for support, or more explicitly, they don’t pay for it.

Your customer does not give up easily what they are accustomed to; so they need to be convinced. It is not easy; at times, it is impossible. Basing innovative ideas on existing data, relevant research, and similar examples will significantly shorten your time to persuade your customer. Otherwise, you will inevitably suffer from financial loss as well as a loss of motivation in a short time. Therefore, you should express your data in a way that is as easy to understand as possible.

We all work to earn money, but the planned financial return of a project does not always mean that the project is profitable. Due to high expectations, the extended working hours, arbitrary decisions, and “one step forward, two steps back” processes, the unscheduled and unpredictable project-end becomes extremely destructive for all team members, and unfortunately, there is no compensation for this damage.

Let’s go back to our original question: When is the customer right? The answer to this question is related to the core values that should be a part of relationships both in our life and at work.

Firstly, the customer is right when they can integrate with the team as well as communicate with their team. Then they should be able to define the scope of the project as accurately as possible by analyzing the needs of their customers extensively. Moreover, they should participate in the process instead of continually interfering with it, and finally, they should aim to provide solutions by sharing the needs arise during the process with the team without delay.

It can be added more to the description paragraph above, and each improves the quality of your customer, and thus your project team. Of course, it is not difficult to conclude that a qualified team will produce good quality.

With scientific methods, professional principles, and reliable communication, it is possible to manage not only the idea that the customer is always right but also the processes that ensure the success of the project. There should also be experiences that will shape future business models.