Building Brands One Touch At A Time

February 26, 2009 on 8:37 am | In Advertising, Brand, Branding, Customer Retention, Customer Service, Marketing, PR, Public Relations | 4 Comments

Touch

Thanks to Jason Falls, I saw this post today about brand touch points, which provided an excellent case study of how to bring your brand to life. So much of what we do as marketers involves communication with digital media that we forget how powerful the human touch can be in building a brand.

In the old days, that is the 50s and 60s when you could reach all of America with a fairly simple media buy, you could build a brand primarily with advertising. Today, public relations leads – or at least should lead – the brand building charge. Your PR people should audit every contact you have with your publics to make sure those contacts resonate with your brand. Remember, as we discussed recently, that your employees are your primary communication vehicle.

I once worked on a project for an airline in which we looked at every point of contact. Some of these points of contact were out of the brand’s control, although customers didn’t think that they were. For instance, signage and parking at the airport were little things that angered customers that the airline could not control. In fact, out of something like 30 points of contacts customers mentioned, about half were out of the airline’s control. But these were essential to the brand. So, we had to come up with ways to strengthen the ones we could control and mitigate the ones we couldn’t.

This airline had a high percentage of repeat customers. So we offered them an email program that provided them with directional information and parking tips for the various airports this airline flew into. Where we couldn’t control, at least we could inform.

Have you done an audit of your brand’s touch points? Any surprises about what customers thought were points of contact within your control? How have you changed your touch points to better serve customers and build your brand?

Other Posts Of Interest

  • http://blog.ecairn.com laurent

    So true that employees are the primary communication vehicle..and so much more now that social media has enabled them to interact more broadly than ever.
    Today, many corporate employees already engage in Internet conversations because they share interest with others outside and are fueled by passion (or not) about their products/brands. They connect with customers and Internet media influencers, and learn from these exchanges. Although these interactions generally foster a positive image for their respective organizations and brands, there is no assurance that they can’t
    also create negative momentum, inadvertently as you described in your example.
    I witnessed PR, Marketing, company bloggers, evangelists from engineering engaging in social media, most of the time in silos and quite honestly inefficiently. I believe the time is ripe for “team social media” within enterprises. “team social media” would be a cross functional team of individuals engaging together in the right communities/with the right influencers.

  • http://leodimilo.com/internetmarketingblog Leo

    I actually read in a trade magazine just last month of a restaurant that has “touch” points…12 of them…at each of these touch points, they required an employee to acknowledge the customer in some way or form….kind of overkill if you ask me but the point is the same as this post.

  • http://www.e-buzzink.com Jamie Sullivan

    I found this post as an excellent “call to action” for something I believe wholeheartedly in … Now is the time to leverage our collective creativity and relationships to cast our “nets” wider than ever before.

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