So we’re up to our fourth date in this article series about brand experience strategy. Isn’t it about time to break down your walls and get personal in this relationship? If you’re here for a first date, though, you may want to go back and start with the proper introductions when we defined what we wanted out of the brand experience.
Because today, we may need to get into some tough love: dealing with the silos in your organization. The question is are you working with each other or just near each other?
When it comes to the brand experience, people in different silos or departments of a company will give different answers about how to deliver on it, which is often fine because each role has a different part to play in the brand experience. However, what we’ve discovered is that rarely do these different departments talk with each other about the whole brand experience. They’re mostly focused on creating AN experience instead of synching up THE brand experience over time. And supporting agencies, consultancies, suppliers and producers rarely know what all the rest are up to. Actually, even within companies, most departments don’t really see their role in the brand experience or get any meaningful insights, data or strategy for it.
But whether you do or not, your customers will connect the dots. In fact, they don’t even see dots. They see one brand. They don’t distinguish between your customer service and your sales team, your product and your social media presence. An inconsistent or “meh” experience in one area reflects on them all. You cannot expect people to buy what you’re selling when they don’t “buy what you’re selling.”
“X brand’s products are supposed to help us be carefree and happy, but their customer service sounds like the grumpiest place on earth.”
“Yeah, Y brand says they believe diversity is strength, but did you see they just partnered with Z brand, the most male-dominated company in their industry?”
People may not say these things out loud or even think them in words at all, but they do feel them. And as brilliant minds like Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman have proven, we aren’t the rational creatures we like to think we are. We choose with our gut and our emotions first and rationalize afterwards. Even in B2B. We’re all human and we judge companies on how they act all the time, not just how they act in public.
So, together with relevance and gaps, we want to find where in your organization things may be a bit isolated or misaligned – the silos – and then help bring you in sync.
Our team at Comprend is exploring how to help companies become more modular than siloed – orchestrating a smart way to share information and cross-pollinate ideas as departments come in at different times depending on needs and stages of the brand experience. We help as a showrunner, keeping the holistic brand experience in sync over time, and ensuring every role is informed, inspired and focused in their part of the experience – allowing them each to shine in their areas of expertise without maverick experiences spinning off into inconsistent brand experience.
This true collaboration also hinges on measuring right. Companies can no longer accept siloed efforts, but that also means companies need to start measuring departmental performance on collaborative efforts and results, not just their own functional performance.
So after defining brand experience, introducing the infinity loop, talking about relevance, looking for gaps and dealing with silos, now we have only one moment left together. And it’s all about sharing special moments. So slip into something comfortable and meet me here again next time.