People buy experiences not brands

Feb/07/2007 07:11 Filed in: The future of DTC?
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Why is it that Starbucks, after continually failing taste tests, can command a premium price for a cup of coffee? Why do Starwood hotels have the highest ROI per square foot of rooms compared to Marriott? The answer is that these two companies provide their customers with a superior customer experience. People today don't buy brands..they purchase experiences and if your not charting the touch-points with your customers then you are wasting time and money.


From the fist time your customers see one of your DTC commercials to when they go to your product website your customers are engaging in the brand experience. If it's not a positive interaction for them what do you think is going to happen? Marketers don't focus on this today because they are too busy doing other things but if you chart the customer experience with the brand it can identify potential customer dropouts and help you develop interventions to ensure that these dropouts are minimal. It costs too much money to get customers to interact with your brand for marketers to ignore the touch points yet in my conversations with other DTC marketers that is exactly what is happening.

Starbucks knows that people come into a Starbucks for the brand experience..it's rewarding and something that they do for themselves. It's also cool to walk around with a Starbucks coffee cup. Starwood hotels continually promote the "heavenly shower and bed" which entices business travelers who want to escape the daily hassles of travel today. Because of this superior brand experience they are able to command premium prices and own a position in consumers minds. Pharma companies have not adopted a model like this often because they have to deal with a matrix department to chart the customers experience with the brand.

There are those who believe that customers are not emotional about pharma brands and to them I say simply "untrue". All brand choices are emotional. Let's take the statin category for example; there are a range of products that are all competing for a share of this market from market leader Lipitor to Vytorin. Yet type Lipitor into Google and you will see a host of consumer generated media sites that tell people of their horrible experience with Lipitor. Rather than reach out to these people Pfizer continues to ignore them and a risk that their voices could become louder and sway people to competitors.

The best way to ensure that marketers understand their customers is to simply chart each interaction with the brand. What do we want to have happen and what is happening now? How can we ensure that we execute flawlessly to ensure that each touch point with our customers is a positive one? The market is getting just too competitive today for marketers to ignore the brand experience. It's time to think like consumers instead of marketers..
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