Marketing from the customer perspective – by Rodrigo B. Ferreira

This post helps marketers understand how to focus on the brand experience to turn customers into advocates for the company and the brand.

Any customer should have a positive experience with the brand and the company from the need recognition phase and awareness of the brand to the desired advocacy (or at least to a positive purchase experience).

Thinking of the brand experience as a multi-step process that takes place all the way through the “Awareness to Advocacy” (A to A) scale helps marketers identify at which level a brand wants to communicate to the customer and how to do it more successfully. These 2 key elements become clear once we identify the point where the target customer is on the A to A scale.

Although not all customers will make through to the advocacy level, marketers should bear in mind that each individual customer may be persuaded to advance one more level by a well-crafted message.

The complexity of the A to A scale will vary as a function of two basic variables: The time and energy necessary to reach a purchase decision and the risk from a poor decision.

The more complex the decision which a customer needs to make, the more touchpoints will be required to take the customer through the different steps, but broadly speaking the steps will be:

•      Pre-Awareness or need identification (marketing can begin influencing from here)

•      Awareness of the brand

•      Gathering of information

•      Evaluation of options and reasons to believe

•      Purchase experience

•      Results (post purchase evaluation)

•      Loyalty

•      Advocacy

Each of these steps has the potential to take anything from minutes to years and each step may have a large number of sub-steps. It all depends on the nature of the product, service or solution in question and whether the customer is a person, a business or some other institution.

The messages to the customers should always emphasize the main benefits that the customers will achieve as they become loyal to the brand and even the brand “personality”. Finally, the touchpoints should be weaved together so that they make sense to the customers and lead them through the experiences along the A to A scale which will potentially take them to the advocacy level.