The beginnings of Brand Consistency.
I had just completed Focusrite’s Tone of Voice, as part of a revision to their Brand Guide. I had also kicked off a glossary and lexicon initiative to operate across the group, with variations by territory and brand. I felt that they were beautiful tools in their own right — stunning in their simplicity, and entirely fit for purpose. I couldn’t help but transfer my own pride and excitement onto all those around me. Surely everyone felt like me; that this was a huge achievement set to transform the entire business, driving consistency and saving time. Sadly, it wasn’t until a year later that there would be any real value gained outside of marketing, and only when I looked beyond marcomms did I realise where the true impact would be achieved.
I also fell into another trap; mistaking beautiful theory for practice. I gave a presentation to the management team on some of the key internal brand initiatives that were, in my opinion, going to transform their lives and the fortunes of the business. As the business grows, with finite resources, and in order to ensure customers sense a singular, consistent human entity, we needed to focus on the areas of greatest impact first, and not be distracted by almost irrelevant touch points. In short, we had to prioritise, and I had developed a theory on touchpoint analysis that would ensure we focussed all our energy in the right places, pursuing consistency where it would have the greatest impact. I’d even created a new equation, which to my knowledge hadn’t been done before — at least not verbatim. The problem is, it remained theory caught inside the marcomms bubble for months as we shaped, refined and perfected the guides. It would have gone on that way for a while longer had the head of customer experience not casually asked for me to take a look at something for him.
Focusrite had recently developed a mass storage device easy set-up wizard, triggered upon connection, for their 3rd gen Scarlett USB interfaces. Indeed, the same solution would be applied to other brands and customer journeys, complete with narrated video tutorials, written guides and step-by-step online journeys, guiding the customer through the ultimate getting started experience from the moment they plugged their new unit in. Since Customer Experience was undeniably closest to understanding the customer’s mental state throughout this process, and the department most affected by, and measured on, the success or failure of the solution, it was in their court to deliver. By lucky chance though, the Head of Customer Insight came to ask my advice on the wording for the tutorials. That’s when it clicked. My theory was good, but I still wasn’t putting it into practice, and I hadn’t yet looked beyond marcomms.
Back to this equation then. An equation that should in theory guide the business to prioritise the application of its brand rules to the customer touchpoints most likely to impact its long-term success.
(TEQ)C
(Time x Emotion x Quantity) x Control
Breaking it down, the idea here is to create a comparison metric for the impact of all the brand touch points, to see which deserves the mainstay of our attention. It considers the quantity of customers that each touch point is likely to influence, the impact of those touch points on each customer, measured in time and graded on emotional investment, and the degree to which the experience was within our control.
By way of a comparison, let’s apply it to the creative work which many marketing professionals pour weeks and weeks and significant budget into; advertising, or more specifically in this case, paper media advertising.
Firstly, if we consider time in this context, a paper media ad is, on average, viewed for just a matter of seconds. There are a number of different studies, and I do understand that it’s dependent on numerous factors and varies hugely, but two seconds is a repeat theme here, so let’s go with it. I divide time into five brackets, from one to five seconds, up to an hour plus. The two seconds septa flicking past an ad scores a ‘one’ on this scale.
Next, when we think of emotional investment in this context, the customer is not usually in a heightened state. They’re enjoying the experience of perusing a subject matter of interest, usually focusing on editorial copy and unlikely to be actively seeking a specific solution. Although your team’s creative masterpiece might be able to evoke some degree of surprise, fear, joy, sadness, anger or disgust, prior to engaging, (assuming they engage at all), far more often than not there is little or no expectation on the part of the consumer ahead of having that experience. I’ve historically scored emotional investment from one to five, and at best, paper media scores a ‘two’, no matter how good the creative is.
Quantity is more objective than control and emotion, though it has its own complexities. For the sake of this argument, let’s assume a readership of 20,000, with a 1.5 multiplier for eyeballs on the page, so 30,000 impressions.
Finally, you are in control; well, almost. You can’t always manage the surrounding content (though you should always try, given the impact of subconscious precursors on our frame of mind) but you can at least control the content itself entirely. I apply a one to five score for control too, and paper media ads are routinely a four or five, dependent on whether one can control the surrounding media.
With all the data plugged in, I don’t bother normalising it. Indeed, I usually hide the results column. You just need to understand which touchpoints rise to the top. It’s the prioritisation that matters here, not the score. Paper media ads would routinely drop down the list, which is one of the reasons why the budget diminished over time too.
Now back to that chance opportunity that shouldn’t have been left to chance; to help write the script for the getting started content.
On average, the getting started experience lasts longer than 20 minutes. In my scoring system, that’s a four. More importantly though, the emotional engagement is at its peak. The customer has just invested hard-earned cash in an item for which they have high hopes. Chances are, especially with more complex technology, they’ll also have substantial fears. ‘Will it do what I want it to? Will it work with my system? Is it really going to make a difference?’ Either way, that first experience with a new product scores extremely high on emotional engagement. Get it right, and you can have phenomenal impact, creating an almost evangelical advocate for your brand or service. Get it wrong, and you may end up with a detractor for life.
In terms of quantity, I can’t share the specific number of customers who went through this emotionally-charged, 20-minutes+ experience, but nearly every customer did, and Focusrite are undeniably the world’s most popular audio interface brand; it’s a large number.
Finally, the entire experience, from the point they connect the unit, up until they tick the box to confirm they’re happy with their new set-up, is entirely in Focusrite’s control to create and refine, with a constant feedback loop to improve, ad infinitum.
The getting started experience ended up being the single most important brand touch point for both Focusrite, and it’s since led me to realise how valuable touch point analysis is. It’s the old adage of ‘planning prevents piss poor performance’ which applies here in spades. Taking the time to really analyse how customers touch your brand, across the entirety of the organisation will help to ensure you direct your initial pursuit for consistency towards the right areas.
And if you’ve not yet created a guide to secure the kind of consistency essential in developing a ‘love brand’, do the touchpoint analysis first. Relish the opportunity to immerse yourself in areas of the business you’ve perhaps shied away from in the past. You might be surprised where the biggest opportunities lie. It’s a reminder then that Marketing isn’t a department. Marketing is the entire business and brand consistency touches everything. Identify the biggest influencers in your organisation and get them involved in developing the tools you need to achieve consistency together. Play with the numbers and see what rises to the top. Reaching out in this way may just be the catalyst you need to rethink your own marketing mix, or even transform the entire business.
