Question: Does Customer Experience affect Brand Recall and Brand Loyalty?
Answer>: Google It!
“I’ll PayTM it to you.” “I’m Ubering.” All these are not just teen lingo. Brand names have now become synonymous with customer experience that they are no longer proper nouns but used as a verb. While it was believed that brand recall and brand recognition came with time, newbies like PayTM and Uber prove that customer experience can get you there faster and more effectively.
How did Google, Uber and PayTM do it?
Brand Recall, Brand Recognition and Brand Loyalty
Before we dive deep, here’s a quick primer on what some of these words mean:
Brand recognition: When you see the unique purple packaging on a bar of chocolate, you immediately recognize the brand as Cadbury. You recognize a Benz car by its emblem. Brand recognition is identifying a brand through its packaging, logo, identity, ads etc.
Brand recall: When you think of taking a cab, do you think of Uber? If asked to name an antacid, is it Gelusil? Brand recall is a measure of how well the brand is associated within its product category or industry.
Brand loyalty: This is your real competitive advantage. What will get your customers heading straight to your product again and again? That’s brand loyalty.
Customer Experience and its Role in Achieving Brand Recall and Loyalty
A recent study on the impact of brand awareness and customer experience on brand loyalty, brought out the different aspects involved in a customer’s purchase decision. It proved conclusively that a good customer experience seals the deal and brings in brand loyalty.
A good customer experience touches on nearly every point of the sales and marketing cycle.
- The product experience – The feelings evoked in consumers when there is a physical contact with the product.
- The shopping & service experience – This is based on the interaction of a consumer with the store’s physical environment (website and ecommerce portal if it is an online purchase), the sales and customer service personnel and the store’s policies and practices.
- Consumption experience – This is the personal experience of consumers when consuming the product.
- Brand experience – This is the overall experience of the customer with the brand, which includes brand design, packaging, advertising and the emotions and behavioral response of a consumer when he interacts with the brand.
An unsatisfactory experience for the customer on any of these points “leaves a bad taste,” as it were, and the customer is left with a negative image of the brand. A consistent positive experience however, does just the opposite and contributes to effective brand recall.
This is where brand awareness programs can help. The same study mentioned above shows that just as important as it is to deliver a good customer experience, the experience in itself also depends on brand awareness.
Consumers’ brand awareness plays an important role in the decision-making process (Keller, 1993). It has been shown that brand familiarity can increase consumers’ confidence in the purchase and enhance their attitude toward the brand.
Aren’t we all guilty of approaching a product with an unfamiliar brand name with skepticism, which usually works to ruin the product experience for us? Increasing brand awareness and enhancing customer experience work in tandem to create a positive brand image for the customer. A consistently great customer experience increases brand recall and brand loyalty.
Case in Point: PayTM
The reasons for PayTM’s resounding success was brought out in an interesting blog on Finextra.
To summarize, here are the key points:
- Viral Distribution by encouraging non-users to register and receive money
- An aggressive and direct merchant acquisition drive
- Ease of Payments without repeatedly having to sign in and sign out
- Cashbacks as incentives
- Wallet preloads on the fly without user intervention
Classic Branding: Coca Cola
Let’s take a lesson from Coca Cola. It is one of the oldest brands we know and yet it keeps evolving, never slacking on its brand awareness efforts. Despite the knowledge that soda isn’t good for you and fierce competition from other brands, Coca Cola has made itself relevant through the years by creating a brand that is an experience, an idea that is relatable and which makes consumers feel good about themselves.
Their focused efforts date back as far as 1887 with a coupon initiative where 10% of all products were given away for free with the goal of increasing brand awareness. Posters, festoons and more were given to retailers to ensure the brand name stuck. Some of their more recent efforts include the “Share a Coke” campaign that continues creating a personalized experience for consumers worldwide. From regularly featuring influencers to the massive volumes of consumer generated content on their social media, Coca Cola continues enhancing customer experience through its brand awareness efforts. The 3.4 million followers on Twitter and 107 million fans on Facebook are a resounding testimony to this.
In conclusion, working on enhancing customer experience is the way to go if you want to achieve brand recall and loyalty. I would love to hear your thoughts on how you are doing this for your business.
