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All about the book > Book/chapter summaries > Section 4: Experiential Drivers: FusionBranding on Customer Terms
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Section 4: Experiential Drivers: FusionBranding on Customer Terms
If emotional drivers attract customers to FusionBrands, then it is experience that makes them stay. Customers view their experience with FusionBrands through several perspectives.
First, how well did the experience match their own expectations as well as the promises made in the advertising, PR or other marketing? A satisfactory experience may not be enough if customers were promised an exceptional one. Delivery in two days may seem like a failure if the customer expected delivery in one.
Next, how much value was provided? Customers want consistency and reliability in exchange for their trust and loyalty. Delivering exceptional service one time, then dropping the ball the next time is worrisome and unappealing. Value also includes relevancy and knowledge. All sales and service operations must communicate knowledge about the offering and, ideally, about the customer as well. Finally, for the majority of customers, the value received from the customer's perspective must equal or be greater than the price.
Finally, how much of the experience was on customer terms? A company may design an excellent service experience, but if it's not what the customer is looking for, then it represents a FusionBranding failure. Case in point: The New York Times (nytimes.com) allows customers to manage their subscriptions from its Web site. But the capabilities are only accessible after the publication assigns a password. Almost all other sites allow customers to choose their own passwords.
Lack of quality used to be the primary factor that soured a customer experiences. Now that quality has substantially improved, service is the main issue driving experience. Despite near-universal understanding of the importance of service, service appears to be an afterthought at many companies. It's one reason why customer satisfaction has declined every year for the past decade, and why rants about service fill the media.
Section 4 covers four areas to ensure a quality FusionBrand experience:
 Chapter 11 - FusionBrand Service: The greatest gap between customer demands and corporate performance is in service. Unfortunately, too many companies see service only in terms of cost. But service, like quality, doesn't cost. It pays. No FusionBrand or customer relationship can be established unless customers consistently have excellent experiences purchasing, receiving offerings and getting issues resolved. FusionBrand customer service is based on end-to-end customer service, institutionalization of customer knowledge and a customer service culture. An important component of service on customer terms is effective self-service.
Chapter 12 - Up the Organization: The integrated organization common today evolved to meet the demands of the mass economy. Today, it may hinder FusionBranding. That's because most organizations are based on the departmental boxes - "marketing," "accounting," etc. - that focus on products or regions, not customers. A FusionBrand organization for the customer and demand economies requires evolution toward a relationship enterprise that incorporates customer and supply chain relationships, a focus on processes and outcomes, not functions, and the development of a customer equity culture. New organizational responsibilities are required to address customer equity, globalization and the supply chain as processes focused on customers.
Chapter 13 - Power To Act: IT departments used to only support "backoffice" operations like accounting or scheduling. Today, IT supports the customer. No company can achieve a quality experience for the customer without an advanced, integrated IT infrastructure that incorporates both effectiveness and accountability. Admittedly, technology can be tremendously complex. The complexity can be simplified by concentrating on four core FusionBranding technologies. These are protection, including security and privacy; integration of data, legacy systems and supply chains; communication, including increasing bandwidth, wireless and P2P; and wisdom, represented by data mining and knowledge management. Because these are so key to operational excellence, investments in these areas must supersede technologies that get more marketing attention, such as email and marketing automation.
Chapter 14 - Capturing the Value: FusionBrands must not only create value by doing business on customer terms, they must also capture that value. As a result, pricing is critical. Yet most firms do a poor job of pricing. They let pricing be driven by outside forces, have an incomplete picture of costs or just follow the competition. The key to maximizing profitability and customer equity is knowing the value of the offering to customers. Segmentation is also critical because various components of the offering can have different value to different segments.
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Many offerings fail to become FusionBrands because they concentrate on creating and building emotion. While emotion is a vital part of FusionBranding, no positive emotion can be maintained unless it's reinforced with a positive experience. Emotion can trigger a sale, but experience is the critical bridge to customer equity.
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