Make Your Brand Matter: Experience-Driven Solutions to Capture Customers and Keep Them Loyal

Combine brand and experience into a single, exciting whole to drive growth

The Digital Transformation era has come and gone. Experiential concepts like personalization, transparency, transference, uniquity, and immediacy are now table stakes in an increasingly connected and responsive market. Companies that failed to ante up are already gone—or fading fast.

In Make Your Brand Matter, serial entrepreneur and brand strategist Steve Soechtig delivers an eye-opening discussion of the post-Digital Transformation era in which we now live. The book walks you through the evolution of brand and experience, leveraging examples of historical and digitally native brands that have succeeded and failed to seize the digital moment.

You’ll discover brands that enabled new customer acquisition, customer value optimization, and customer loyalty, all the while realizing that brand and experience are two sides of the same coin. The book also offers:

Strategies, techniques, and activities for teams to capture digital opportunities Discussions of why brand and experience reinforce one another and how experiences must embrace, reflect, and enforce brand identity Tactics to accelerate the customer’s progression from evaluator to loyal advocate

Make Your Brand Matter is an essential resource for marketing professionals. It also belongs on the bookshelves of company founders, owners, managers, executives, and other business leaders seeking to develop their organization’s ability to marry brand and experience into one coherent and exciting package.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven Soechtig is the CEO of Ogilvy Experience and has worked at the intersection of brand and experience for over 20 years. While employed at Deloitte, in 1999, he was given the opportunity as part of a small team to launch a digital agency, Roundarch, which addressed the earliest questions around the impact of digital on brand and experience. After exiting Roundarch, he was again part of a small team that launched and ran two other software startups, Orchestria and Abiquo, each of which offered solutions to improve the customer experience to ultimately drive the brand’s growth agenda.

In 2013, he re-joined Deloitte as a Managing Director and led the creation and expansion of their Digital Experience practice, working with global clients to understand their markets, their customer’s expectations, and their pathway to realizing their growth strategies through digital experience. This led him to join McKinsey as an Expert Partner in the Digital Marketing practice, which offered an opportunity to work at a board and C-Level with senior brand and experience leaders to develop five-year strategies for differentiation and market growth. The deep understanding of the intersection of brand and experience positioned Steve to take on his current role as CEO of Ogilvy Experience, where he currently leads an organization built to advise clients on the core topics of this book.

Introduction

Better Lucky Than Good

What to Expect from This Book

Chapter 1: A Far Too Brief History of Brand Strategy

The Emergence of Modern Brand Strategy

The Intersection of Brand and Experience

The Criticality of Experience

Chapter 2: The Dawn of Digital

The Birth of the Internet

Online Advertising Begins

Personalization of the Online Customer Experience

The E-Mail Explosion

Customer Expectations and Technological Innovation

Emerging from the Digital Transformation Era

Chapter 3: Focusing on the Modern Consumer

Millennial Expectations

Generation Z Expectations

The Customer Funnel

Awareness

Evaluation

Transactions

Engagement

Loyalty

Chapter 4: Believing in Your Brand and Redefining Your Strategy

Experience Defines the Brand

Building a Culture Through Data Analytics and Engagement

Location Through Data Analytics

Leveraging Technology to Drive Engagement and Growth

Turning Brand Promise into Reality

Chapter 5: Selling Experiences, Not Products

Commoditized Brands Become Invisible

Customers Control Branding

Replacing Products with Experiences

A Foundation of Innovation and Performance

Creating an Engaged Community

Pivoting to Gain Market Share

The Fusion of Digital and Physical Personalization

Customer Connection, Personalization, and Omnichannel Strategy

Chapter 6: Time Is the New Currency – Anticipating without Being Invasive

Collapsing Time

Time-Saving Conveniences

Data-Driven Innovations

Making Quick Service Quicker

Post-Digital Data and Loyalty

Four Time-Based Lessons

Chapter 7: Finding a Novel Approach to Solving a Market Need

Ambassadors of Innovation

Strategic Innovations in CRM

Novel Omnichannel Engagement

Building Innovation into Your Brand Strategy

Chapter 8: Humanizing the Experience

Understanding People’s Needs

Expanding an Exclusive Market to Everyone

Human-First Engagement

Risking Controversies for Growth

Humanizing Effectively

Chapter 9: Connecting Your Customer with Your Cause

Embracing Corporate Social Responsibility

Shifting from Brand Identity to Social Cause

Authentic and Proactive Leadership

Engaging and Inspiring the Community

Committing to the Cause

Chapter 10: Looking to the Future

Innovation with a Large I

Predictions Sometimes Miss the Mark

Emerging Experience Trends

AI-Enabled Conversational Interfaces

Augmented Reality

The Metaverse and NFTs

Chapter 11: Where You Should Begin

Three Approaches to Assessments

Three Prerequisites for Assessments

Three Areas of Assessments

Agile Experience Innovation

Notes

About the Author

Index