When I start conversations with clients one of the fundamental ideas I really enjoy discussing is their customer’s journey.
More specifically, finding the questions a customer asks throughout their purchasing decision.
An agency’s goal is to understand the brand, understand the customer and help build the bridge between them.
One thing I’ve noticed with clients is that their estimation of a customer purchase cycle is less than what it should be.
Often they think a customer’s purchasing decision occurs a lot quicker than it does.
To simplify this idea, let’s make the purchasing decision fall into just the two categories of impulse and planned.
An impulse purchase is in the next 24 hrs.
A planned purchase is a more deliberate process.
If your customer won’t make a purchase within the next 48 hrs your marketing goal is branding.
What branding does is associate your company name with an idea.
You want to be synonymous in the person’s brain with that idea.
For example let’s assume you’re a physical therapy clinic. Not everyone you’re marketing to is going to need care, but they will get hurt at some point in their life and your marketing goal should be to make them think of your physical therapy clinic as soon as they get hurt.
A customer tears their shoulder and they immediately think Boise Physical Therapy.
This is branding.
Associating a moment, a feeling, a need with a companies product or service.
Gillette is razors.
Dawn is dish soap.
Klenex… well, Klenex is Klenex.
You get the picture.
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Now let’s take this a step farther.
Once you’ve established the association of your brand with a particular idea you don’t stop branding.
Why?
Because banding increases mental switching costs.
Let’s talk about switching costs then tie this all together.
Switching costs are the costs you pay when you change from one product to another.
From and iPhone to an Android.
From a Tropicana to concentrate.
From Whole Foods to Trader Joe’s.
Each brand has their physical pros and cons.
Each customer has their own measure of pros and cons.
But what’s often forgotten is that mental switching costs exist.
We build relationships with brands like we build relationships with people.
We use the same emotions to connect with brands.
And like relationships, the deeper these emotions become the harder it is to switch.
This is because it takes a lot of mental energy to uproot the association we have with a brand, the idea they’ve associated their self with and then associate a new brand with the idea.
What makes it easier is if brand a competing brand does something that hurts the relationship they own with a customers idea. This creates an opportunity for another brand to replace the association brand 1 has with the idea.
But when we develop customer relationships, when we grow the level of affinity and speak to our customers more regularly with things they want to hear, we make it hard if not impossible to uproot the brand and idea association.
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When branding for your clients or for your own projects think about:
How a customer’s purchasing decision happens
How a customer wants you to talk to them about the idea they are going to associate you with
How to continue to develop your relationship with that customer at all stages of the journey
Marketing is mass communication but branding, branding is mass relationship development.
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