Customers & Experiences

I’d like to start by saying that a customer will always evaluate or prefer a brand based on his/her personal experience with the brand. So when a customer goes into a store, and he gets to use the products he’d just bought – he gets to evaluate each brand he’d just had contact with. In marketing, this is referred to as “touchpoints”- moments where customers have personal contact with a brand that will help them develop their own impression of the brand. So the product, packaging, price, sales personnel, they’re all touchpoints for the customer. So, in the end I guess it really doesn’t matter what other people think about the brand, or what the brand itself communicates to it’s target market…what really matters is what the customer experiences with the brand – based on it’s performance, quality, what it means to her/him – and the connections he/she makes with it.

Brands constantly try to reinforce their personal image and try to do all it takes to maintain their promise. That way if a brand like Wal-Mart promises saving money, customers will expect to find lower prices at Wal-Mart than at any other supermarket. But it’s up to Wal-Mart to make sure that they’re delivering their promise, so they can keep their customers satisfied…without forgetting to consider that they (Wal-Mart) should create a good, positive and rich full experience for their shoppers, so that they return and shop at Wal-Mart.

I was trying to come up with an example of my own experience with a brand, and I just couldn’t decide on which one to write about, since I’ve had a lot of experiences with several brands. But, well, I guess Apple is the first I thought about. I remember that about 4 or 5 years ago, all of my friends started buying their first Mac laptop. They were so excited with it- they talked about Itunes, Iphoto and I just didn’t understand what they were talking about. I knew I wanted one, but I’ve just had a year with my old one- it was a VAIO. However, my parents gave me for that Christmas a mini Ipod – my first Apple product…I just loved it! It did more that I would’ve expected it to do. I could transfer all of my songs to that mini machine, and update it any time that I’d want. I used to take it to the gym, to run, in my car, when I’d travel…and the coolest part was, that it was cool and fashionable. I couldn’t wait to get now my Apple laptop. The next year, I asked my parents for one, so I went with my dad to the Apple store to buy it. The store was so cool! It had many desks with all the Apple products, and you could just go and try for yourself the several features each different model had. When I made my decision, a sales personnel told me all about the warranty, and the service they gave for free to the Apple customers- the genius bar. I was truly excited; I couldn’t wait to use my new Apple laptop. I knew I would have a difficult time on getting used to it- ‘cause I knew it was very different from the others computers – but to my surprise, I only took about a week. I’ve been very satisfied with Apple ever since, now I’ve got the new Ipod, Iphone, and I’m hoping to upgrade my laptop to the newest version.

I think that in Apple’s case, it’s more about just their products, it’s about the philosophy it has and the experience it creates for its customers. As a marketer, I know that for example their slogan of  “Think different”- it’s a strategy from Apple of creating a way of thinking- experience. You, as a customer know you’re getting something cool, modern and different by buying one of Apple’s products. Also Apple creates an experience for the customer when they go to their store – they let you use their computers, they have a genius bar for technicians to help you, the employees use cool t-shirts with phrases like: Advisor, Ask me anything, How may I help you, etc. So all of these things help customers develop an overall experience with Apple’s brand.

For customers, it’s all about the experience (when it comes to a brand). This is why we see thousands of people buying Starbucks coffee everyday – ‘cause when a brand creates all this new and positive experience for the customer, a customer is willing to prefer or give more value to the brand, because of what IT means to him/her. Starbucks isn’t just a cup of coffee, it’s a place where you can get really good coffee, excellent service- good personnel, cool sofas, cool music- and a place where you can just chill out.

Personas

I found the readings on the persona lifecycle to be quite interesting and different on the material I would’ve expected to read. I wasn’t expecting to be initially introduced to the process of how to create a persona - I didn’t know there were that many guidelines! But, I guess in the end it all made sense…you need certain steps to go trough, as in any other research & development activity, to develop a successful prototype of your persona.

Karen, from Procter & Gamble had already given us an idea about what the “persona” concept is. She showed us the type of persona they’d worked with for their new ageless makeup (Maybelline) line, and explained to us who this persona was- characteristics, insights, personality, etc. I guess it sounds kind of obvious, at least for me, when you’re able to see a connection between the final product and who this user is, for the brand. But, to my surprise after having read the articles on the persona, there’s a lot of thinking, research and planning involved.

Maybe you’re wondering what is a persona? I was trying to come up with a definition on my own, but instead found on a blog, a very simple and yet, useful explanation of the meaning of the persona. “Personas are fictional characters created to represent different segments of the market or target demographics.” So, with this in mind, we can see that personas are created by companies for a purpose- to understand who their prime users are. Personas are given by marketers, a certain age, gender, education, life style, needs, goals, expectancies, ethnicity, and many other things- including names-, so that companies know who they are dealing with and who are they trying to reach. But, to know all of these previous characteristics about your persona, marketers need first to go throughout the persona lifecycle-which consists of 5 phases. These are: family planning, persona conception and gestation, persona birth and maturation, persona adulthood, and persona lifetime achievement, reuse and retirement. The phases of conception and gestation, and adulthood are the vital steps. In conception and gestation, marketers are working on using and converting the information they’ve already gained about potential user population, user research data, demographic information, etc. to translate it into valuable information of their personas. This way they are able to understand the specific user roles, user goals, and user segments that uniquely describe their “target” users. In the adulthood phase, personas already have been introduced to the company and to the product team, so it is now time for the personas to be of use for designing and developing the product. Personas are used to help the product team plan, design, evaluate and release the products. They ask questions like: “Will Tom want to use a big object or a smaller one?” or “Will Sarah be interested on this feature? ”

If a marketer would like to create an accurate persona of people like me, they would probably come up with the following description:

She’s in her early 20’s. She is still a college student, with many goals of her own, and who is actively engaged in her education. Still don’t work, but her parents still look after her. She wishes to take the most out of everything- if she hears a conference is coming up, she’ll be willing to go, she participates in almost every single one of her classes, she is extremely responsible when it comes to projects and homework. She tries to always stay fit-eats healthy, goes to gym or runs every once in a while. She always has things to do- goes out with her friends, loves going to the salon every once in a while, cleans up her room, goes shopping. She barely stays at home just watching a movie by herself, if she were to do it she’d had to watch it with someone else. She is a people-person; she loves to always know about what’s going on with her friends, with her family, etc. She loves to travel and tries to go out of town minimum 5 times a year, and tries to organize a trip with her friend minimum once a year. Loves shopping. Loves going out- clubs, restaurants. We’ll call her ANNA- the active-college student.

A brand persona isn’t the same persona for all brands in the same category. The persona for Mc Donald’s isn’t the same persona as it is for Wendy’s. Brands need to differentiate, and one of the ways they do this is by developing a detailed and unique persona (or many if they need it), to understand what brand products suit them the best. So, this leads us to the conclusion that developing personas, it’s a very helpful strategy for companies to differentiate among themselves and get a better approach to their target users.

A design philosophy

In the past, people expected to buy what the market had to offer them. But today times have changed. In today’s marketplace, companies from all around the world must sell products and services that consumers want, need or wish for. Everyone, including you, me, teachers, business CEO’s, employees, and even the more humble people, are all consumers. So, how exactly do companies know what their consumers want?

That’s what my marketing Customer Insight’s class is teaching me at the Mc Combs School of Business. Nowadays, companies have learned to observe people’s everyday actions in order to understand their needs and design new products; not only have they learned this, but they know it’s an essential strategy for surviving in the marketplace.

Recently at our class we have talked about certain design philosophies, and how these philosophies have helped designers/engineers develop many innovative products. But, what exactly is a design philosophy? A design philosophy is sort of a personal point of view of the way you believe things, such as products, should be designed in order to function accordingly.  Jeff Mulhausen, an industrial designer who works for Upstream, was invited as a guest speaker to one of our classes. He showed us some important industrial designers and the design philosophies each one of them followed. The designer who interested me the most was, Dieter Rams. He is a German industrial designer who in his time worked for the German-brand Baun. As opposed to the other designers, Rams believed that a good design is a design, which is as little as possible. So, he simplified products so that people wouldn’t have a hard time understanding and using them. He designed for example, a simpler version of the radio than the one that existed in the late 1960’s. So, these philosophies each designer followed influenced on the way they saw new opportunities for design and the kind of products they created.

I can say from my own experience as a customer, that a product which I find really innovative in terms of its design, is the hands-free can opener (see figure below).

Before I owned one of this, I used to have a regular can opener, and I tried to use it as little as I could, since I’d get finger cuts, or I’d had a hard time getting the can opener attached to the can. But, I think whoever came with the idea of designing this new and improved version of a can opener really thought of an easier/simpler way to get cans opened. All you have to do is simply place the device at the top of the can and push the button. And, now I just realized that the hands-free can opener may be connected to Ram’s design philosophy of developing a design as little as possible.