Customer Sentiment
Perhaps this goes against the wisdom we had a few decades ago where it was, you know, keep everything very risk averse, everything controlled. Be a brand that sells not a brand that says things, and that's changed a lot recently. So I'm curious your take on why this notion of brand persona, this idea of brand identity has perhaps become so much more important in recent years?
I think there's probably 2 obvious answers. One, I would definitely say, competition and market saturation is a big one, and then I also think the element of anyone can influence. So we'll get into social and community discourse a little bit later, but anyone really can influence, anyone could go viral on tiktok, and so there's just there's things that you can control, and there's things that you can't.
And I think when we look at almost any vertical or industry, it's incredibly saturated with brand overload from beauty to wellness products to fashion. In any vertical, brands are competing with a really packed landscape and have to find ways to to stand out, and that is through your brand pillars your brand values. It's not going to be through a random ad or an affiliate link anymore. It's not going to be through not engaging.I think what makes a brand stand out right now is how effectively and consistently you can communicate your values, your pillars, your position, to nurture your community.
I wrote a Linkedin post recently, around the ebb and flow of businesses or brands, prioritizing brand marketing versus digital growth and kind of back and forth again. And I think every couple of years it just shifts like this. You see that in hiring and in workforce reduction, whatever the business is prioritizing at that time, that team will probably be impacted. And so I think my perspective is that the most successful brands are going to walk and chew gum. They’re going to be focusing on developing their brand, leveraging their community, making sure they're actively listening. While also working hard to drive revenue and diversify their revenue streams.
I wanna get your sense on how you even formulate those core values and what you choose to communicate versus what you don't.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, from a very kind of step, one mindset. It's a it's a very big, existential question that hopefully is being asked or pondered on at the founding of a brand or a company, and from there it's then reinforced and revisited and gut checked against some of the the research that I'm sure Louise will talk about, and then also used a filter as the brand grows. As brands grow, it's really easy for things to just get away from you. As you go from a direct to consumer, ecomm only brand to opening physical retail spaces, you might feel like you know your customer less. And so if you start to abandon or not focus on using those pillars or those values that you founded the company with as a filter, your customer experience is gonna change, your product might be impacted. There's so many different ramifications. And so, you know, it's really dependent on the brand or the business. If you're a cleaning supplies brand that focuses on non-toxic products and refillable reusable containers. Your values are probably going to sit around organic ingredients and sustainability, and your customers are probably going to care about those values. They also might care about aesthetic and how it looks in their home, or the fact that it's pet and baby or child safe. And so you're sort of like distilling your values as a hierarchy, to be able to communicate those things effectively. But ultimately it needs to mean something. I think the best brands have a reason for being, and then they continue to revisit and refine those overtime.
As someone who's worked with brands that surely have their, you know, promoters and detractors at times surely have discourse happening online. How do you keep tabs and sort of maybe drive? To what extent can you even drive this conversation.
Yeah, I mean, this literally just happened at the Super Bowl with Usher and Alicia Keys. The Internet, just, you know, totally has a mind of its own. And after the fact, everyone's like, really what? How did that go from 0 to 100 so quickly? And so I think the point is that we cannot control it. And so you have to kind of lean in and learn from it. I think that if you're not a very active part of your community and performing very consistent customer service, community and social listening, you're going to be left behind. I also think that if your business or your brand isn't decision making with your core values in mind. So again, back to that filter, then you're going to eventually get called out for it. It’s happened to many businesses even this year already. And so I think that the authenticity and the commitment to whatever your brand values also shine through in how people respond to your brand. In fashion, there's this Tiktoker, who takes apart handbags and then ranks the quality of the handbags. Super luxury down to like urban outfitters and brands are like, what's he gonna say about us? How is this going to shake out? And you can't control it. They're not being paid. And so I think that there is like a little bit of a scaredness sometimes, but again you have to lean in and listen, and if there is an interesting finding there, don't be the tenth dentist that just kind of ignores it. Take action. I think that the brands that win today aren't just the disruptors or the challengers. They're the brands that see opportunity to go above and beyond in service. And we've also seen that a lot this year. The North Face did it with helicoptering a jacket out to a hiker who is really mad. Rightfully so, she got soaking wet on a hike. Stanley Cup has just had a resurgence over the last, you know, 6 months to a year, and both of those things were because of the teams at those businesses
paying attention. And so if you're not doing that, you're just gonna completely miss the mark and miss your opportunity to engage and create, maybe potentially a lifetime affinity with someone or with a group of people.
You’ve worked with a variety of different brands that surely had, you know, moments of truth and moments where you potentially really want a customer, or maybe you left them on the fence. And so, what are some recommendations you have for really assessing and measuring the impact of some of these external moments of truth to customers?
When I think about this, and just in a bit of a bigger sense - when I worked at Savage, obviously Rihanna did the Super bowl halftime show last year. And so you know, how did we think about going into measuring that and understanding brand sentiment and equity and awareness and lift. If you know about the initiative in advance, you don't always, and as marketers we always wanna try and control the weather, but can’t. But, if you do know beforehand you could look at your pre and post event and look at whether there's a lift in your brand equity or awareness. You could do a sentiment analysis, and then you can just kind of gauge, overall, uplift on various brand questions that you could decide what they are. And you can do that on various platforms, digital platforms, customer surveys, things like that. And so you could look at how your customer was reacting a few months in advance of that bigger initiative and then the few months post and kind of what the tailwind of the event is. Depending on the scale of the event, you could also measure slightly softer, but still direct metrics, like your social presence - how much did it grow? How many searches did your brand receive? And how long of a tailwind was that? So, how impactful was the event, slightly longer term? Or was it really just within the hour or the day? How much traffic was driven to your site in that period of time? Was there a specific product highlighted in that initiative, that then the sell through was impacted in really great way. So there's a lot of different things that you can look at. But I think each event kind of needs a little bit of a different approach based on whatever's happening.That's a little bit more from like a scaled initiative, something that maybe not just a one influencer post or something like that. But that's how to think about how to measure overall brand awareness and or adoption or the efficacy of a specific event or initiative that happened, culturally or otherwise.
Some of the brands you work with definitely have an aura about them where they're, you know. It's not meant, for, you know, every single person in the world to have them yet you certainly want as many customers as possible. So how do you think about some of these balances from a luxury brand perspective, and making sure that you're staying true to who you are and what your core value is, yet recognizing that you are going to be casting a wider net to some degree at certain points.
Sure, I think that there's so many different levels of luxury. And so, when I think about or refer to luxury, I really think Heritage (a heritage brand). And so luxury, you know, does in fact, not grow itself. I think that the elements of client centricity, active clientelling and brand events and collaborations and physical retail stores and pop up are very critical to staying relevant and top of mind for consumers. Probably more so the younger generation that the brand may still be very inspirational or aspirational, too. I think, though, the customer experience is very intertwined with brand strategy. I think that the way your customer navigates through your website, your store, their experience with customer service, they're after purchase - how they care for their products that they bought or how you interact with them after they purchase, how you're gonna follow up with them or treat them during important moments are both heavily strategically brand driven, based on again your values and and how you want to treat that customer experience, and then also our very user or customer experience focused. And so I don't really think that we should be forsaking one for the other, especially on the luxury side. I think that you know, when you look at the adoption of e-commerce, for instance, in luxury - true heritage brands, it's adoption is very, very minimal. And it's generally pretty product category specific. And so that kind of speaks to that exclusivity piece. They want to control that customer experience because they have a brand expectation that they're trying to uphold across the board, globally. And so earlier, when I was talking about that expansion of going from direct to consumer to physical, and so on, and so forth, and your customer can get farther and farther from you. It's their way of, for lack of a better word, controlling how they, how the customer, experiences, is entered into or is nurtured throughout the lifetime of their relationship with the brand.
Yes, there is a marketing component here, but there's also a full customer experience customer journey part that's equally important when it comes to defining luxury.
Yes, and also, when you think about - if you walked into a Chanel store, they have beauty, they have fine jewelry, they have handbags, ready to wear, so on and so forth, but the experience for the customer of buying a $35 lipstick or buying a $5,000 handbag, from the Brand's perspective, they should feel the exact same, because that lipstick customer might be a watch customer in a couple of years, and their experience of how they felt being treated, what their purchase experience was, even though they're maybe buying the least expensive thing in the store, was amazing. They left feeling great about themselves. They got beautiful packaging, and so they have that lasting memory. I think that that's something that luxury does really well.
Is there like a way to think about partnerships and sponsorships that can be bigger and more fruitful for your brand in the long term.
Yes, definitely. I think that there's so many ways that you could approach a partnership or sponsorship or collaboration, but ultimately it should be grounded in a value, a shared value or shared goal by both parties. And so, whether the goal is, you know, social proof or expertise validation or expansion, or just maybe it’s very unexpected but there's an obvious story there that you can conjure up. I don't believe in partnerships just for the sake of partnerships. I think we can all tell when a celebrity or someone is endorsing a brand that they just have absolutely no connection with, or don't believe in themselves. We were talking the other day about Louis Vuitton and their involvement in the Olympics in Paris this upcoming year. And maybe initially, you're like, Oh, really weird. But it's their home city. It's their home country. And the brand felt like they couldn't not participate. And so I think that that is a really grounded way of looking at how they can be involved - culturally supportive of their country and their city, and then all of the athletes and people and tourists, and so on and so forth, that are gonna come, visit them. And so there's obviously a brand play there. There's obviously gonna be awareness that's driven there. But it's also very authentic and grounded in a shared common value and goal.
As someone who's worked with brands that would very much have a presence or be talked about at this kind of event. So what were some of the takeaways that you had here?
I think my one big thing that I just kept thinking about as you were talking, Louise is, I would be remiss to mention the tunnel walk. I think that it's a pretty consistent, you know, in the NBA, WNBA, and football where you just get this incredible master class in very individualistic style, and in this case specifically Menswear. From the small leather goods and handbags to small luggage, to the suiting, to new types of suiting. Travis Kelce was in like a shiny what looks to be sequined suit. And when I think about the NBA, same thing, custom, Thom Browne. I think that that those brands are also winning in a big way, because those people are very influential and there was a lot of coverage about the tunnel walk this time, and how that team and those teams were showing up and dressing and showing their style and their power and their individualism. I was really super excited by that. I loved all this data that you shared. I read through it the other day, and I think it's so fascinating and useful and can help impact how brands decide to think about showing up in a space like this, and it's not a one size fits all. You don't necessarily need to buy a massive billboard in the stadium to have a really incredible brand moment.
Final thoughts before we wrap on this.
Yeah, it's been so fun. Look, I mean
1) listen to your customer and your community and take action. Don't be passive.
2) If you don't know what your brand values are, and you can't communicate them effectively to yourself, to your company, or to your employees, your customer definitely isn't going to get it. It's not going to land, and you really need these to make good decisions, good brand decisions, good business decisions, again through that brand values filter.
3) Lastly, I would say, because we haven't really talked about the teams involved in some of this work, create a really curious, diverse team and culture that celebrates good discourse and ideas versus like the most senior person in the room, winning, and really pay attention to the people that are closest to the social listening and to your customer. Listen to your retail partners, and use all that information to make good decisions and evolve your position.
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