by Wayne Hull (@wayne_hull) What is a brand experience? It’s an interesting question. Here in South Africa, many companies still regard the notion of ‘experience’ as somewhat esoteric — as an intangible that can’t be measured. Yet, if you look at some of the leading brands in both sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, you see a different mindset: recognition that experience is, in fact, very tangible. That you can measure it and see how it yields monetary outcomes.
Inherent lovability
What goes into a great brand experience? Today, it’s less about the basic usability or viability of a product; it’s about that product’s inherent lovability. And that brand love may, importantly, be built up into a remarkable brand experience. Critically, customers today are looking for remarkable brand experiences — because they’re already getting them elsewhere, from digital leaders like Amazon.
This leads into a key fact. Experiences today are what we call ‘liquid’. For example, if you’re a South African bank providing an online experience, your customers aren’t necessarily comparing your offering only to what other banks provide; they’re comparing it to Travelstart and Gumtree or Amazon and Facebook. Experiences today are critically important to consumers — and consumers are very demanding.
To build remarkable experiences, you have to design from the consumer inward, and use data as rocket fuel to do it. Do it right and you have an 80% chance of building a great experience that your customers will love.
Everybody has a favourite experience. For me, it was always a Nespresso shop. Wherever I was in the world, the Middle East or Switzerland, I always went to the Nespresso store. Everything, from the colour of the capsules and the design of the cups to how the staff engage with you and that they remember you from last time, was magical. When you buy the capsules, you feel like you’re buying something from Louis Vuitton. Since then, I’ve moved on a bit, to Vida Coffee. Its cafes have got energy and vibe and it’s doing great, leveraging the brand and expanding — proof that experience is about much more than just the product. It’s about energy and fun, usage, engagement and relevance.
The state of digital in SA
Recent research into SA from a digital perspective, which involved taking a number of top companies and measuring them against their global peers, found that companies in SA have got quite a way to go. When the SA company pool was compared to its global peers, it was found that only 5% of SA companies could be considered to be ‘digital leaders’, relative to 25% of global digital businesses.
In general, customers in SA are also slow to change. That’s why some weight needs to be put behind the digital agenda, to create that shift.
In doing so, there are some digital legacies that need to be overcome. Many SA companies went down the digital innovation path, for example. They invested in it like a holy grail. But only a tiny proportion of companies has actually seen a return on their investments in that regard. So, you’ve got these two headwinds — SA lagging in a digital sense and innovation failing to create the returns companies thought they’d see. It’s what you have to overcome when explaining to companies why an experience strategy is key.
Talking tech
In reality, today, almost every company is a tech company. You can be a tech company providing rooms, a tech company providing services to cars, or a tech company specialising in online products or banking services. And when there’s an enormous tech component to almost all businesses, there’s no such thing as a digital strategy any longer; there’s just the business strategy for a digital business.
In this kind of environment, working in an agile way is crucial. Waterfall approaches (where every product has a long design-and-build phase) just aren’t going to work in a market where you need to constantly iterate based on customer feedback. Today, you build products with your customers — not for your customers. Your customers are part of the journey.
Look at Rain, for example; it’s created a solution around a key customer problem, namely cost of data, and it’s building a new experience around that, and iterating based on customer needs.
Today, companies have to be courageous in terms of how they release new products and how they design experiences. Customers want to be recognised. They want relevant information. But they also want fun, energy and engagement. Pulling off every aspect needed to create remarkable brand experiences is very complicated. But it’s where the new battle for customer love and loyalty will be fought.
- The above is based on views shared during a panel discussion “What Does the Customer Actually Want? Mapping the Customer Experience” at the GIBS/Strate Fintech Disruption conference, held on 19 June 2018.
Wayne Hull (@wayne_hull) is managing director of Accenture Digital for South and sub-Saharan Africa. He returned to South Africa after spending 13 years in the Middle East, Pakistan and Switzerland, where he was at the forefront of the cutting-edge technology in the areas of internet of things (IoT), data analytics and online media.
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