Photo comment: customer delight is not reflected on this young passenger’s face
Source: SAP Business Innovation
A brand is a hologram containing all the attitudes, perceptions, emotions, and associations consumers have about a product. So, while the brand name (the spoken part of a brand) and brand logo or trademark (the symbol for a brand) are important, it’s really this brand image that drives purchase. Hence, when we talk about brand strategy, we mainly focus on that brand image.
5 hacks for brand strategy success
1. Create customer delight
Brand strategy succeeds by creating superior value for consumers — or at least the target personas. An easy way to provide superior value is creating products that delight consumers and supporting them with flawless service.
Creating customer delight comes from truly understanding consumers and giving them what they want. Sometimes giving customers what they want means going beyond what they can imagine. For instance, if Henry Ford asked consumers what they wanted, they would have said they wanted faster horses because they lacked the imagination to conceive of something faster than horses. The car met their needs.
Customer value also comes from giving customers something unexpected, such as little rewards for using your services or adding new features to your products — for instance Microsoft recently offered Windows 8 users a free upgrade to Windows 9 to placate dissatisfaction with the Windows 8 platform.