Do you map? Follow your customer and you'll be on the right track.
Published on 1st October 2024By Matthieu Mondin, Strategy Director
A strong brand is made of dozens of components: the products or services, logo, visual & audio identity, corporate culture, advertising, online experiences and content, social presence… that’s why it often takes years for marketers to build a strong, enduring loved brand. And every year, the same question comes about. . .
Which project should I prioritise to improve my brand equity and meet my objectives? This ultra strategic exercise is what we call: The brand planning.
Forgetting the essential: our customers!
But too often, those decisions are made based on the marketing and communication department’s opinions and beliefs. Forgetting the essential: our customers!
Customer journey mapping gives details and showcases the current level of satisfaction for every interaction a customer can have with your brand. Based on qualitative and quantitative research this tool is a great way to help marketers prioritise the projects that would improve their brand’s reputation.
This job can be done internally or with the help of your agency using tools like Custellence, Miro or even PowerPoint and you can easily implement it around a series of workshops by following 5 steps:
Internal discussions: Ask yourself and your team if your customers are all purchasing and using your products and services the same way. That will tell you if you need one or several mappings to address those potential differences.
Internal discussion: Identify all the contacts a customer or prospect can have with your brand. Before, during and after purchasing your product and/or services.
Qualitative research: Use the mapping with the overview of all the different stages of your customer journey to understand what they like (motivations) or dislike (blockers) for each stage of the journey. This research will also allow you to identify stages or touch points you could have missed but that are actually part of your consumer’s journey when interacting with your brand (e.g. using Instagram as the main way to contact customer service).
Quantitative research: Only statistics can give you the right indicator to take effective decisions. At this final stage, you will measure the volume of each motivator and blocker for each of the identified stages.
Prioritisation: Identify the areas that could affect your brand perception the most and focus on them. This is also the stage to identify the right people to include in the project (in the entire organisation from IT to content…).
Here at McCann Bristol we love using the customer journey mapping tool to build our client’s brand planning and prioritise projects according to where the customer experience is not yet optimal. It gives our clients an opportunity to re-focus on their customers’ feelings and make a real impact.
