According to Ad Age, the core rational benefit of the Bud Light brand is “drinkability.” And it has been for some time:

“Drinkability had been in fine print on Budweiser’s label since the 1960s and often raised in creative briefings to communicate Bud Light’s appeal: You could drink a lot of it, and it was less watery than Coors Light and less bitter than Miller Lite. Cambridge’s process strongly endorsed it as the ideal rational benefit.”

In spite of the inflammatory headline, there’s really nothing here that supports the “sound bite of blame” indirectly slamming Cambridge Group. Yes, a great deal of research was done, the results of which were handed off to Anheuser-Busch and their agency. But by everyone’s admission, Cambridge didn’t have a finger in the creative process, and there doesn’t appear to have been a directive to take the rational benefit of “drinkability” and make it the core of the ad campaign. Nor did the research appear to say “throw out all emotion, and just focus on the rational benefit.”

The fact is that CMOs are under increasing pressure to bring a little science to the creative process – as they should be. Which aspects of the brand have the greatest traction? How can touchpoints be optimized to drive desired results? Where is our marketing investment driving the greatest return?

The answers to these questions, and many related issues, is in marketing and customer research. What drives customer experience, brand perception and desired customer behaviors can be assessed by talking to the source of your revenue: your customers. But the kinds of answers you get will be based on the questions you ask. And even more importantly, you – and your agency – need to know what to do with those answers.

Is “drinkability” dead? No. In the immortal words of Monty Python, “It’s not dead, it’s only resting.” But if your agency takes the rational benefit for the brand and forgets the core underlying principles of buyer behavior (that we all make emotional buying decisions, but these need to be supported by rational benefits) then there’s no huge surprise when the sales dial doesn’t spin.

It’s a little like love. No matter how much your brain tells you someone’s “right” for you, if your heart isn’t engaged there’s simply no spark. And if your ad agency appears to forget that emotion is how you sell and logic is how you justify, then no matter how funny or highly produced your ads, they probably won’t be moving the dials that equate to increased sales.

So just don’t tell me about “drinkability.” Tell me how it makes me feel, and why I should care. And to better understand the answer to that question, it probably makes sense to do a little more research (or read beyond the summary pages of research results).

Organizations of all types and sizes rely on Customer Satisfaction Surveys to better understand their relationships, with most finding a comfortably high percentage of satisfied customers. Yet time and again, 60 to 80% of lost customers surveyed have claimed to be “satisfied” or “very satisfied,” just prior to defecting. Why? Because satisfied customers aren’t necessarily loyal customers.

Using satisfaction surveys as a tool, many organizations learn how “satisfied” their customers are with the relationship, only to find that these measures don’t translate into retention, profit or referral business.

The answer is simple. Satisfied customers aren’t necessarily those loyal customers who positively affect retention rates, profitability and top-line growth. This means that customers who have high satisfaction but low loyalty can be both expensive to acquire and quick to depart.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Answering a Question that Won’t Help Solve Your Problems

The fact is, satisfaction is the first step on a journey — the journey described in the Customer Relationship Lifecycle unique to your business. Satisfaction (hopefully) follows purchase or trial, followed in turn by loyalty and then advocacy. Measuring customer satisfaction (or loyalty) alone tells you only where you stand on a single metric in the continuum of your relationship.

And while knowing these metrics is good, what’s critical is understanding which dials to turn to improve them. In other words, how do you drive satisfaction for existing customers? How do you drive customer loyalty among those who are satisfied? And how do you drive loyal customers to advocate for your brand?

Whatever process you utilize — MCorp’s Loyalty Mapping®, of course, being one we consider fondly — we’ve found it critical to implement a customer listening program (VOC — “Voice of the Customer”) that both charts where you stand, as well as what it takes to drive customers through your lifecycle towards advocacy.

What you’ll get is an understanding of customer loyalty through metrics including NPS, satisfaction, loyalty and willingness to recommend. But it’s the ability to quantify what drives these metrics that will help you to justify and prioritize delivery on the specific activities that drive increased retention, greater share-of-wallet, and other customer behaviors that solidify the relationship between customer loyalty and financial outcomes.

Essentially, it comes down to ways that we can track existing attitudes, attributes and perceptions, developing a clear understanding of brand and how it specifically affects perception — with insights helping to more effectively position you in the competitive marketspace.

Most brand research consultancies — and MCorp’s Brand Mapping^SM practice is no different — defines these associations by speaking with your stakeholders: employees, prospects, customers, etc., helping to understand the attributes, associations, affinities, drivers and motivators of brand, loyalty and differentiation across key segments and geographies.

Today, we do this primarily by reaching out to respondents, gathering opinions through a variety of proven research methodologies that get at core beliefs and associations. Already, brand research has migrated to the web and is in the process of going mobile. While these technological trends are both increasing access and lowering costs, the promise of Social Media for brand research is even greater. What if we — not just brand research consultants, but the marketing staff in your organization — could:

• “Virtually” follow one (or many) customers around for a week to see what brand interactions drive them to say something positive (or negative) about it?
• Track brand “buzz” in the online world to see what opinions are trending up or down on any given day about your brand, products or services (and quantify how this activity trends and changes over time)?
• See what members of a particularly attractive market segment really want vs. what they may say they want in a more traditional survey environment?
• Build your own “brand community” (a captive research panel, if you will) around a shared interest in your brand, giving you the ability to collaborate, test, and measure brand in near real-time, at an incremental cost of next to nothing?
• What if you could do all this for each of your strongest competitors, and gain insights into market dynamics and opportunities that could only be dreamed of a few years ago?

Guess what? For all these and more, the future IS today. From free tools like Google Alerts, Twitter Search and Social Mention to more detailed (and expensive) quantitative Social Media measuring and monitoring platforms like Radian6, the technological framework is here now. The social web has already changed perceptions about business — changing perceptions, expectations, and people’s minds, often at light speed. Now, it’s adding depth and dimension to the way brand research is conducted to drive new insights and ideas.

Today, you need to know how your brand is being discussed and experienced online. And, you need to act on what you learn to get ahead of issues, or jump on opportunities. But brand research in the future, and its intersection with Social Media, is the ability to not just follow consumers, but to actually see what they’re saying, thinking and doing in the many unstructured (and often unguarded) interactions that occur in the Social Media sphere. And that kind of insight gets at the heart of “brand” for us all.

Since that time, there has been an un-ending push to find more (and better) ways to connect with, and track, these customer interactions. In fact, the explosive growth of CRM has created a multi-billion dollar IT and consulting services business focused on just this issue. But these technology-based solutions often cause organizations to lose sight of the core issues which drive the customer relationship.

While adept at helping companies market to and track interactions with their customers, these solutions do nothing to help companies to understand (and improve) customer impressions of these interactions. This is where moments of truth, touchpoints and customer experience intersect. If a “moment of truth” is the opportunity for an organization to make an impression on a customer or other stakeholder, touchpoints are the static, human and interactive interactions that actually create these impressions. Working together, touchpoints create positive or negative impressions at any given moment of truth. The result? Customer experience – as perceived by the customer, which is the only perspective that counts.

When touchpoints (and relationships) go bad

For a telecommunications company, the installation of a business line is a moment of truth. The touchpoints associated with that (service technicians, email or print confirmations, call center or web-based appointment setting, etc.) will deliver a customer experience that in an ideal state is consistent, positive and drives positive impressions of the brand.

Of course, it only takes one negative touchpoint (for example, an apparently tipsy and belligerent service technician being an unforgettable negative touchpoint in one customer’s mind, or the cable installation man caught in the wife’s underwear drawer another) to create the experiences that drive negative lasting attitudes towards a brand.

At the same time, the elimination of the onerous “service contract” for cellular phones by Virgin Mobile, or Progressive Insurance introducing “Immediate Response” claims service – assessing damage and paying claims at the accident scene – are game changers, taking traditionally painful moments of truth and redefining them with touchpoints optimized to focus on customer’s needs – driving new standards of customer experience and expectations in their industries, resetting the “competitive bar” at the same time.

Over the last year we’ve had a front-row seat to a textbook example that leapt from the business section to the front page, and is now being splashed across televisions sets around the globe. It’s pretty widely acknowledged that Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe” screwed up royally – after all, their greedy myopia nearly brought the global economy to its knees.

At the first public hearings on the crisis just a few short weeks ago, a Reuter’s article noted that “Wall Street’s chiefs acknowledged taking on ‘too much risk’ and having ‘choked’ on their own cooking, but stopped short of an apology….”

Do we wonder why financial services firms are held in such low esteem? While it may be a particularly low point for the industry, this isn’t a new thing. Nearly six years ago, a Forrester 2004 report What Satisfies Financial Services Consumers noted that, “Less than half of US consumers believe that their firm would do what’s right for the consumer without government regulation.”

Funny, because the taglines and ads of these same financial services firms – and many like them – drip with sincerity and concern; for our financial wellbeing and security, as well as more emotional pleas like “peace of mind.” On the one hand, they want us to “trust them.” On the other, they have done – and seemingly continue to do – everything in their power to prove that we can’t possibly.

The funny thing is, most of these banking and financial services executives seem to be thinking all this negative sentiment will just go away. And maybe it will. But hoping your screw-ups will get swept under the rug when you neglect to acknowledge them isn’t the way to build an enduring brand.

It’s a classic brand gap. And you don’t need a brand audit or customer experience research to figure it out. No matter the size of the company or the industry you’re in, if there’s a disconnect between what you say and how you behave, your customers are going to know it. Of course, most disconnects aren’t so blatant, nor so well publicized.

How is your organization doing with its brand promises and gaps? just because you don’t see your mistakes on CSPAN doesn’t mean that all’s well, or that disgruntled customers will sit idly by. To butcher the late John Irving, sorrow floats – and loyalty sinks. Glub glub glub.

Here’s the thing that many organizations seem to have trouble grasping: every interaction between you and your customers (or those you’d like to be customers) is part of the brand experience. Every single one, every single time.

This means that your brand attributes are communicated clearly – both positively and negatively, whether you like it or not – every time you “touch” your customer. These interactions include obvious touchpoints like advertising, your website, call center and sales team. Then there are those touchpoints that aren’t usually at the forefront of brand experience planning, such as Google SERP’s, billing statements, online customer forums and more. At the end of the day, virtually every point of contact between you and your customers impacts the customer experience. The lesson to be learned? Everything matters.

So when it comes to planning customer experience, keep their point-of-view in mind. Look at the customer relationship through the lens of his or her “journey” as individual interactions string together to create experiences, driving brand perceptions and attitudes. You’ll be amazed by what shows up when you start mapping customer experience. It often isn’t pretty, but it sure can be illuminating.

It’s pretty straightforward, in theory. Know what customers want and need at each stage of their relationship, and give it to them. Be consistent in what you say, how you say it, how it looks, and how what you say and do supports your brand promises. And always keep your customers in mind.

Simple, right? Surprisingly, it often can be. If you take the step of auditing a typical customer journey, you’ll likely be ahead of 90% of the competition. We see it every day – simple steps often lead to big returns. After all, knowing what the issues are is the first step to fixing them.

There’s something refreshing about a (seemingly) heartfelt apology for mistakes made. “We screwed up,” he’s saying, “and we know it.” What’s not said but implied is obvious to parents (and consumers) worldwide: we’ve learned our lesson. Let’s fix it and move on. Maybe the ad’s a little sappy, but hey – it does a great job reminding viewers why Toyota is (still) the number one car company in the world. It’s actually heartening to see a grown-up stand up and take the heat.

After all, when’s the last time any of us saw a politician apologize with something other than crocodile tears of self-pity and shame, almost universally brought on as the result of stunning self-absorption, monumental lapses in judgment and a total lack of humility?

Perhaps it’s because humility isn’t a great brand attribute for U.S. based companies. Michael Useem, professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania was quoted recently in The New York Times saying, “American culture does not put a premium on apology.”

Maybe not. But when it comes to driving brand loyalty, I’m much more likely to open my wallet for someone who actually seems to care. Good luck, Akio. Yeah, you screwed up. But I, for one, accept your apology. Just don’t do it again…

Your customers will define you, if you don’t define yourself.
That’s why, for most organizations, the key to success is differentiation. Even if nearly identical in many ways to other competitive offerings, your prospects and customers do perceive differences. And these differences influence purchase decisions, and relationships.

But how do you define these differences? You start by gathering information, understanding the brand experience as well as strengths and weaknesses as perceived by your key audiences. Internally, this includes executives, management and customer-facing employees. Externally, garner insights from your customers, investors, prospective customers and others.

Taken together, this provides the data you need to create a perceptual map of your brand.  This “brand map” will help you understand where you stand with your customers, and the market overall, today.

Where do you want to go… tomorrow?
Brand research, and analysis of the data that must both drive and validate your approach, doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s relatively easy to capture both “present state” and “aspirational” brand attributes, values, and differentiators if you are smart, are a research expert (or have a team at your disposal) and understand both your business, and the underpinnings of high-performing brands.

But what isn’t easy is to create true differentiation by relying totally on what exists today. Yes, building a brand based on “present state” values and attributes takes both strategic acumen and research skill. But defining a brand that truly says “We’re Different; We’re Better; We’re Special” takes something more. Simply interpreting the numbers won’t drive the type of category-defining brand that many high-performing organizations wish to become. Supported by defensible (and illuminating) market and brand research, it also takes creativity.

Mind you, we’re not talking about “blue-sky let’s see what sticks” creativity, but creativity rooted in a deep understanding of your vision, your culture and your customer experience. To build a truly differentiated brand, you need to define where you want to go, where the “ideal” customer experience intersects with business, strategic and market realities, and set a stake – a defensible, differentiated stake – in the ground.

As Harry Beckwith points out in the book Selling the Invisible, “Create the possible service; don’t just create what the market needs or wants. Create what it would love.”

Our experience shows that the utilization of research to drive brand insight requires multiple approaches to effectively measure brand experience, and understand ways to improve it.

The brand research toolbox includes various sampling methodologies.

Some of the most popular include one-on-one interviews, web and phone based surveys and focus groups. Deciding what approach to use comes down to the one question that simply isn’t asked (or more accurately, answered) often enough: what (exactly) are we trying to accomplish?

At the core of MCorp’s Brand Mapping approach, we leverage brand research to balance insights, strategy and defensibility with our ultimate goal: a deep understanding of the brand, a defined path to improving it, and defensible metrics that tell you with a degree of certainty where you are and where you need to go. So when it comes to understanding your brand, where – if anywhere – do focus groups fit?

Bottom line, we don’t think that focus groups are an effective technique for this type of brand research. Why? Several reasons:

1. Even with a skilled moderator, focus groups tend to be influenced by the few dominant people in the group, driving potentially biased output.
2. Marketers find that focus groups tend to deliver a single perspective; individual opinions are hard to capture because of group dynamics.
3. As a series of opinion from groups of 9-12 people, the results simply aren’t projectable over a broader audience. Whether or not the opinions expressed are valid is one thing; but attempting to project these opinions over broader audiences simply isn’t possible.

In short, it’s really hard to quantify or validate results, the sample size is small, and you simply cannot generalize findings to the target population. In fact, we’ve been called in several times by organizations who have attempted to research their brand with focus groups to get to defensible conclusions, and failed.

And as a vehicle to quantitatively assess elements of a brand platform, focus groups are useless.

In our experience, focus groups tend to capture perceptions of a moment in time, not how customers really organize their lives and their emotions. And because group dynamics play such a large part in the findings, they aren’t effective for drawing conclusions about a given population, though they are often used for such purposes.

We’ve found that the most effective method of gathering qualitative data around current brand perceptions are one-on-one interviews: with employees, customers and prospects, as well as the broader market. In our experience, the “one-on-one” interview process yields insights and frank, honest opinions much more effectively than traditional focus group formats, while costing substantially less.

From this come competitive insights, indicators of brand loyalty and experience, and insights into what drives brand attitudes and perceptions. Once organized, the brand and its position in the market can be validated with projectable follow-on customer experience and brand research.

So Where Do Focus Groups Fit?

The whole idea of focus groups is get people to project their opinions and attitudes in an interactive group setting, where participants are free to talk with other members of the group. As a result, they’re more of an open-ended elicitation than some of the other methods in the brand research toolkit. In our experience, they can work well for brainstorming new brand ideas, perceptual mapping or gathering creative and concept feedback.

To be honest, all marketing research is subject to Nobel prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg’s famous observation: “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” But  if you’re trying to brainstorm a new brand, creative concepts or brand extensions, focus groups are a great place to start (or finish). But if you’re trying to quantify your current brand, validate your position vs. your competition, understand attributes and values for internal audiences and external customer segments, then stick with methodologies which you can validate and defend.

One bank we worked with was astounded that their customers took umbrage at the prominent eye-level signage on all branch doors: “Remove your hat and glasses before entering.” A practical step to reduce robberies, as the bank thought? Or an unintentional message that says to customers “You are not trusted” or “You are not good enough to do business with us,” as more than a few customers said?

Another bank had a teller that gave dog biscuits to pooch-loving customers when Fido and friends showed up at the drive-through teller. When the teller left the bank (and took the doggie treats with her), brand loyalty scores at the branch turned stale, as well. In fact, they plummeted. It took some time to discover the reason, but now fresh doggie biscuits are a staple at every branch, and the bank is creating powerful connections with dog lovers (and their friends and families!) throughout the area.

This is where the power of stories comes into play. Consumers tell themselves stories. They also tell their friends (also known as “word of mouth marketing”). And the power of brand stories to influence actions and beliefs is as old as the spoken word. And as much as consumers distrust financial services providers, they trust their friends and business associates. This is why delivering a consistent, differentiated and branded customer experience is so important.

It really comes down to better managing and improving the experience, earning loyalty by proving your commitment to your customers, delivering a consistent brand experience one interaction or touchpoint at a time, over time.