In London and Transitioning Between Brands

Note: Image from Doug88888 on Flickr

It's official - I live in London, and as of Sunday all my boxes are unpacked!  Now all I need to do is build my bike, which is my new mode of transportation - exciting!

Thank you for your patience while I've moved across the pond and replanted my feet. I hope you enjoyed the posts by Sean, Ben & Steve as much as I did. Thank you guys for contributing some great content to More Than A Logo.

Moving to another country, in another continent, has been really exciting and rather eye-opening from a branding point-of-view.

In our daily lives, we count on organizations/brands for a lot. From managing our money with banks, protecting our goods (and even ourselves) with insurance, communicating thanks to telcos, buying food from grocers, to even washing our hair with a particular shampoo.

Some of these brands become so fixed into our daily lives that we forget we even had a choice in selecting them.  But because of this move, for the first time in my adult life, I had to select all new brands to align with - it's been quite the task.

Selecting all new brands means a mass exit of my previous brands, which also created an interesting dynamic.

Overall, the customer relationship in this situation, where the customer's life is moving in a new direction, can be seen like a figure eight, which builds off my original brand experience cycle, which emphasizes the need to nurture existing customers to maintain their long-term value to the brand and to grow the overall customer base through recommendations.

But in this instance, multiple brand experience cycles come together, beginning to form a figure eight as the customer begins to leave one brand experience and enters another, with a new brand:

This whole move, and changing of brands, made me realize that often brands forget that there is always the possible opportunity that consumers may re-enter the brand experience cycle down the road. But even more importantly, previous customers are still key in growing (or reducing) the customer base through recommendations.

So the section where the customer leaves a brand is essential to maintaining that positive relationship, for whatever the future may hold.

What I found when leaving my essential brands, like telcos & banks, was how ill-prepared they were in the customer exit process. And, worse yet, how the employees felt they no longer needed to provide good service - clearly never having seen my figure eight analogy before - haha.

It was this bad service & inability to consistently deliver on their brand promise that has resulted in losing my business for the future. In addition, they won't receive any positive recommendations when friends & family ask me about their service.

On the flip side, there were other brands, like my insurance company and dentist, who were so kind, courteous and helpful with my transition, that if I move back to Canada, I will remain a loyal customer, and in the mean time I will gladly recommend them, perpetuating the figure eight.

So after liquidating my life, I've been faced with the daunting task of creating all new brand relationships. With minimal points of reference, I had no idea where to start. So, go figure, I started by asking around, reading reviews, etc. to get my bearings.

This made me realize that the days where we collected information from brochures and other corporate collateral to make our buying decisions are long gone.  If anything, that information only reconfirms the decision the consumer already made.

So, going back to the experience cycle, nurturing existing customers and consistently delivering on the brand promise is essential to growing the customer base. This acts as the foundation of today's advertising, which is primarily becoming WOM from friends, family, tweets, Facebook comments, ratings & reviews, 3rd party videos, etc.

Once you get a customer through the door, I found, the first impression is key. This involves how the customer feels they were treated, and how they feel all the other customers within their vicinity were treated.  This gives them an indication of what the future of the relationship will look like in the future, and if it's good and remains consistently good, you'll have a customer for life!  If it's bad and/or inconsistent, not only have you lost a customer, but they usually take a few more customers with them through negative word of mouth.

So the key is delivering on your brand promise & never assume when a customer leaves they will never come back. Stay true to the brand and always nurture your customers...even when they are leaving you.

I look forward to blogging more from London. I love this city...where else can you go to a museum and lie in a pile of 100-million hand painted porcelain sunflower seeds?! Too much fun!