Greater brand power requires an integration of both communications and experience.

By Lawrence A. Crosby and Brian S. Lunde

"The brand is the experience." This increasingly popular mantra is being repeated by both experiential marketing experts and customer experience enthusiasts. It implies that what the customer knows and understands about the brand is heavily (maybe even primarily) influenced by the customer's direct experience with the brand. In fact, we've made this same assertion in previous issues of this column.

But even we confess to a certain amount of hyperbole in such a simple statement. It is true, but not the whole truth about what creates and sustains brands. In our defense, we would argue that there is another camp out there regarding how brands are formed that can be just as single-minded. In fact, it is a much, much larger camp. The people who have pitched their tent there will argue that brands ultimately are created and sustained by marketing—by which they really mean marketing communications, aka advertising and promotion. They spend billions of dollars every year, based on this premise. In effect, their mantra might be "the experience is the brand," implying that customers partially interpret their experiences based on the expectations that have been created for the brand via communications.

The vast majority of the marketing agency landscape is populated by firms who define their whole business through the lens of communication in all its forms (including contemporary emphasis on social networks, which agencies view mainly as communications networks). Agencies serve their masters in marketing and brand management departments.

This brand-as-communications view is also true of course, as an incalculable number of great consumer brands have been established on the back of sustained advertising investment. But this view also is not the whole truth. We think it is time for both camps to listen to each other and create a more holistic notion of where brand power comes from.

We think it is time for both camps to listen to each other and create a more holistic notion of where brand power comes from.

Often missing in the brand power argument is the notion of buying stages. We all know that consumers and businesses go through stages in a buying cycle. Those stages can be densely collapsed and traversed in milliseconds (e.g., impulse buying and consumption of fast-moving consumer goods)—or they can literally span years (major capital investments, military procurement contracts). We can disagree about how many stages there are and how we label them, but they are a reality in many (if not most) buying situations. For purposes of our argument, we will use one of the more widely accepted frameworks for buying stages:

• problem recognition
• motivated search
• evaluation
• choice (purchase)
• consumption/use

It is probably worthy of some note that the recently popularized notion of the "customer journey" shares some conceptual overlap with the notion of buying stages, since (at the root) the customer is trying to solve some type of problem.

The idea that customers proceed through such stages is the basis for articulating this general principle, regarding the integration of the two views of brand power: The influence on brand power of brand communications will decline and the influence of brand experience will rise, as customers move through the buying stages.

An illustration of this principle is given in Exhibit 1. The area under each line indicates the relative strength of influence for each of the two factors. In the earliest stages of the buying process, a customer has little or no personal experiential reference for the brand. Her entire understanding of the brand—and more importantly her motivations toward the brand—are entirely shaped by brand communications, both managed (e.g., advertising) and unmanaged (word of mouth).

Exhibit 1:
Brand Communications vs. Brand Experience

But as she proceeds through the buying stages, she gains brand experience. In particular, she may interact with brand representatives in the form of salespeople. She could experience a product trial or the physical facilities of a service provider. These encounters begin to build an experiential reference for the brand that will either reinforce / build on the brand as communicated, or weaken and contradict it (or even both when considered at the brand attribute level).

At some point, the experiential references become dominant, most commonly after the point of purchase. The consumer can now compare how well the brand-as-experienced actually delivers on the brand-as-communicated. Does it meet her functional requirements? Does it connect with her emotional need set (e.g., affiliation, social approval, status)?

Exhibit 1 shows a band or range around these influence curves. This is to highlight the fact that the specific curves will vary, depending on the actual buying context, i.e., the specific product or service category, whether this is a new-to-the-brand or repeat purchase, whether this is a low or high involvement purchase, etc.. For example, in some cases a consumer might gain considerable brand experience prior to purchase, such as in automobiles.

It is critical to recognize (over the progression of the stages of buying cycle) that experienced-based brand perceptions begin to replace those created purely by marketing communications as a general rule. This is not to say that the influence of marketing communications on current customers is nil; in some categories, the brand reinforcement role of marketing communications may remain vitally important, particularly in supporting emotional motivations (e.g., affiliation needs among beer drinkers). But decades of customer satisfaction and loyalty research in both B2C and B2B markets have proven that customers form long-term attachment to brands, based primarily on their actual experiences across all of the touchpoints between themselves and the brand. The influence of formal and informal marketing communications in driving loyalty among current customers is often relatively weak.

Some of the implications of this simple insight are profound:

1. The brand is not defined or owned exclusively by marketing and its agency partners. This is not a debatable proposition, but simply recognition of the reality of the influence of customer experience on brand perceptions. Nonetheless, defining / refining brands is still commonly practiced as a marketing communications discipline, with advertising and promotion as the primary tools.

Marketing can take the lead in rethinking brand building as a holistic process that encompasses the totality of customer experience—including, of course, communications. An exercise to define—or redefine—a brand should use not only market research, but also customer research that provides a detailed understanding of the brand as experienced.

In some cases... marketing has fallen in love with the brand as it exists in their imagination, without any effort to understand what is really happening in the field.

2. Marketers must be catalysts for their firms in achieving greater consistency between the brand promise and the branded experience. Achieving this consistency will likely require adjustment to marketing communications and customer-facing processes in most firms. In some cases, the brand promise is exactly right for creating competitive advantage, but the firm is failing to deliver on the promise for a myriad of reasons, from internal turf wars to poor employee engagement to mechanistic budgeting and resource allocation. In other cases marketing has fallen in love with the brand as it exists in their imagination, without any effort to understand what is really happening in the field (beyond competitive advertising). Both positions sub-optimize brand power.

3. Brand metrics must capture how the brand is communicated, as well as how it is experienced. Minimally, this requires measures that address both prospective and actual customers. Brand power might be seen as having at least two basic dimensions: the power to convert prospects into customers (i.e., brand attraction) and the power to carry customers forward into long-term relationships with the brand (brand loyalty). Brands might favor one or the other of these dimensions in specific market segments, and a firm's current business strategy could call for dominance of one or the other. But relative balance is going to be the most sustainable long-term position. The brand that can communicate an outstanding promise and attract customers in droves, but cannot deliver the experience will remain plagued by customer defections. The brand that has strong appeal only to current customers risks becoming marginalized by changes in demographics and the shifting preferences of customer segments.

In the end, both marketing communications and customer experience experts are half right in their views of brand meaning and value. The truth does not lie in the middle, but in the joining of these two halves to make a holistic perspective on the complete source of brand power.

About the Authors

Lawrence A. Crosby is the chief loyalty architect of Synovate Customer Experience, and may be reached at larry.crosby@synovate.com. Brian S. Lunde is the senior vice president of business development and marketing for Synovate Customer Experience, and may be reached at brian.lunde@synovate.com.

© Reprinted with permission, American Marketing Association's Marketing Management, July/August 2008 Issue. All rights reserved.