Thanks to Jason Falls, I saw this post today about brand touch points, which provided an excellent case study of how to bring your brand to life. So much of what we do as marketers involves communication with digital media, that we forget how powerful the human touch can be in building a brand.
In the old days, that is the 50s and 60s when you could reach all of America with a fairly simple media buy, you could build a brand primarily with advertising. Today, public relations leads - or at least should lead - the brand building charge. Your PR people should audit every contact you have with your publics to make sure those contacts resonate with your brand. Remember, as we discussed recently, that your employees are your primary communication vehicle.
I once worked on a project for an airline in which we looked at every point of contact. Some of these points of contact were out of the brand's control, although customers didn't think that they were. For instance, signage and parking at the airport were little things that angered customers that the airline could not control. In fact, out of something like 30 points of contacts customers mentioned, about half were out of the airline's control. But these were essential to the brand. So, we had to come up with ways to strengthen the ones we could control and mitigate the ones we couldn't.
This airline had a high percentage of repeat customers. So we offered them an email program that provided them with directional information and parking tips for the various airports this airline flew into. Where we couldn't control, at least we could inform.
Have you done an audit of your brand's touch points? Any surprises about what customers thought were points of contact within your control? How have you changed your touch points to better serve customers and build your brand?