Key Points:
- Brand building and winning loyal customers
- Impact mapping making a difference for customers
- Increasing profits using impact mapping
Brand building and marketing showcases the values, characteristics, and attributes of a product or an organization. In online brand building, a brand must be identical to your physical brand in terms of color, logos, fonts, layout, and look and feel.
The expectation of a brand business is not just selling a single product but wooing the customer with a unique set of characteristics, values, and superior customer experience, which is repeatable and consistent every time the customer buys any product from a particular brand. There are greater chances of these customers eventually becoming the product advocates and brand ambassadors for your products and your organization.
Brands these days spend a lot of money to build its reputation in the market. These brands ultimately are targeting customers who would want to become customers for life or customers who are interested in a long-term relationship, which seems a bit difficult these days.
In today’s competitive and changing business environment, brands are trying hard to attract and retain loyal customers. Trust and reliability are hard to find these days in business.
For customers, a brand is important because of two things – reliability and good customer service. So, even though they get someone offering the same services, they are not comfortable in giving them an opportunity as time and money are important for most customers. They look for reviews and ratings of other customers before they make a switch or think of going to a new brand in the market. Even if it is just a one-time pest control service, the customers think about reliability, quality, reputation, and experiences of other customers with the brand. These factors and other factors bundled together help in building a brand and reputation and in attracting and winning the hesitant customers, who are mostly on the fence.
As today’s customers are bombarded with many brands, they do not tend to stick to or are less likely to stick to a single brand. Customers also want to build and revamp their own brand value in the changing market.
Price, customized customer requirements, shipping cost and time, and reliability are some of the factors defined by customers. Brands are forced to keep pace with the requirements defined by the customers. For example, Uber had to change its business model from a driver-driven taxi to a driverless taxi, and now they are moving toward flying taxis.
As customer expectations change, to retain your customers, brands must do something different, something that seems unachievable at the moment. Brands must act like superheroes for their customers and try to remain a superhero in the eyes of their customers. Some of them are unsaid expectations and dreams of your customers that are rarely shared with the brands, they are like the unsaid expectations of a wife, which brands must try to find out and fulfill. And, if brands are able to understand its customers better, then, the customers most likely want to stick to these brands.
Customers want to brag and boast about their brand and never expect their brand to let them down in front of their competitors. They want an invincible and best brand to pamper their egos.
In the case of online branding, changing the location, size, color, font, and look and feel of the Buy button can have a huge positive impact on the sale of a brand. Even changing some keywords that match the status, moods, styles of your customer matter a lot for the success of a brand. For a brand to always do this is a difficult task and it will definitely keep the brands on their toes.
Is there any alternative to this constant dancing and running? Perhaps, yes, the impact mapping technique is a probable solution to this constant dancing and running. Even here, brands need to run and work hard to make a positive impact in the business of the customer. It is a slightly different style of dance, where you have the scope to define some of the dance steps to your customers.
Impact mapping can help you to give your customers exactly what they need without any need for your customers to overspend. They need not buy a product with frills, they buy exactly what they need. Software as a Service (SaaS) approach is able to achieve this to some extent. The product here is developed from the perspective of a software brand taking into consideration the requirements of multiple customers, whereas impact mapping develops everything as per the bare minimum requirements of a specific customer with no frills. And, most important, impact mapping aims at actually making a positive impact on the lives and business of your customers.
Impact mapping is thinking like a business consultant for your customers where you identify and analyze the growth areas, identify and develop product features that will help in saving time, cost, resources, and in improving the lives and growing the business of your customers. This is somewhat similar to the approach of smaller companies developing additional plugins for a specific customer requirement. Most of us might be thinking, “Aren’t we already doing this?” The answer is, yes, to some extent and in some ways and as a reaction to a customer requirement.
Impact mapping is a proactive approach. Impact mapping brings a total paradigm shift in developing customized products for specific customers similar to the customized furniture that we design and get it built in our homes and offices. If we give and try to give the same customer experience to most of our customers, we will never need to run after customers. In fact, the customers would run behind such a brand, which knows the unique requirements, desires, and expectations of each customer and most important a brand, which knows how to grow their business with the least cost. Cost is a major factor to survive in the competitive market. Companies are always in need of money to fund their branding, research, and other activities.
Brand building is important because it helps you in getting customers. Whereas impact mapping helps you in winning, retaining, and pampering your customers to a level where your customers build confidence in you and your brand. They are comfortable in relying on you to some extent in growing their business.
The choice is yours – brand building over impact mapping or use of impact mapping to build your unique brand and USP against your competitors. Or, are you thinking even ahead of this, help your customers earn more and eventually it is easier for brands to demand and earn more consistently by making a difference in their lives and businesses? Ultimately, it is much easier to convince a happier person and customer than an unhappy customer who is facing a lot of issues with finances, business uncertainty, and other challenges.
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