Branding
When it comes to building and maintaining a strong and distinguishing brand the marketing terrain has never been more challenging. Perhaps, the challenge is even more frightening for service brands. In part this reflects the supremacy of today’s better-connected, highly empowered consumer to use digital word of mouth to spread the news about a bad experience with a service business, in an instant.
But the steeper climb for service brands also results from a distinctive and fascinating set of characteristics and challenges that they share:
INTANGIBILITY
Relative to products that we can hold, use, and consume, people find it far more challenging to attach meaning to an intangible service offering, such as a bank account, an internet connection or life insurance policy.
This makes defining a pertinent and understandable brand promise all the more difficult, yet all the more vital. The goal for Beneficial Marketing is to “make sure your brand promise can be expressed in terms both verbally and visually”; that makes the service feel real, if not tangible.
COMPLEXITY
To battle the product problem, service brands often seek to distinguish themselves by adding complication and nuisance to their core offering.
Yet often times the added layers result in a product offering that goes beyond the consumer’s personal expertise and knowledge and they simply cannot see or appreciate the added value. Beneficial Marketing always puts ourselves in the client’s shoes when constructing multi-level or multi-dimensional offerings to avoid running the risk of over-engineering the service and under-delivering on ROI.
INCONSISTENCY
A brand is by definition an “experience-based” brand that enlightens what may be the key challenge. There is almost no way to reproduce the exact same experience each time for each client.
A thorough description of the desired brand experience at each touch point is a must, but still it can’t eradicate human inconsistency. Beneficial Marketing ensures that you have an extremely consistent brand story leading up to and coming out of the experience.
REAL-TIME
Thousands of times a day, brands face moments of truth. Real-time consumer interactions are opportunities to strengthen your brand by exceeding expectations.
Which is why we must look at your brand-building resources and efforts through the lens of “real-time brand-building” moments. To be true, brand representatives and employees must be able to not only articulate your brand promise, but also be able to translate it to the “brand-right behavior” in their day-to-day, moment-to-moment customer interactions.
These these challenges can weigh differently on any given brand. Beneficial Marketing will conduct a thorough assessment to clearly define and understand which of these challenges most impacts your brand and business. It will make our task of building actionable strategies all the more manageable and set the table for a more successful outcome.
