The Customer Experience Theme

Part 3 of Build Your Marketing Plan Series

July is Build Your Marketing Plan month on The Marketing Spot blog. This is part three of an eight-part series on how to build an exceptional small business marketing plan. Each “lesson” of the series contains a background article, down loadable worksheets and a slidecast. This information is part of my full-day workshop, DIY Marketing for Small Businesses.

(See Part 1: The Brand Promise)
(See Part 2: Your Signature)

Marketing Purpose of the Customer Experience
You cannot expect customer loyalty without a remarkable customer experience. In Managing the Customer Experience, Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler say,

“Creating loyalty is about being intentional, consistent, different and creating value.”

Unfortunately, most small businesses take this to mean offering excellent customer service. But it’s much more than that. Because your goal in creating a remarkable customer experience is two-fold. You not only want create loyalty, you also want to inspire word of mouth. That cannot be done with simple good customer service. Remember, people expect good customer service from you. It’s a requirement and just the starting line.

Your goal in designing a remarkable experience is to exit commodity status and break from the pack. Remarkability is achieved only when you can measurably separate yourself from your competition in a meaningful memorable way. Ideally you will engage your customers so that they will be absorbed by the experience. The result will be the creation of a customer experience that people have to talk about.

Remarkable customer experiences don’t happen by accident. They are not constructed by throwing together a bunch of good ideas. In The Experience Economy: Work is Theater & Every Business a Stage, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore say that great experiences must be well conceived, correctly cast, and convincingly portrayed. Yes, they must be scripted and designed, just like a stage show.

In the next to parts of our Build Your Marketing Plan series, we are going to design, and then map out the customer experience. And it starts with a theme.

It’s important to deliver a consistent and coherent experience so that customers are able to simply enjoy and revel in it. If you have elements that are out of place, it sends subconscious messages to your customer that things are just a little off, even if they can’t put their finger on it. An easy way to avoid experience incoherence to organize all the elements of the experience under an umbrella. That umbrella will be your theme.

Download the two worksheet documents, and then watch the slidecast below. In the next part of the series we will take your theme elements and build a remarkable customer experience.

To download the PDF worksheets, right click on each and then save to your computer. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader.

After you download the worksheets, watch the slidecast below and make sure your audio is turned up. If you cannot see the slidecast in your reader, click here.

| View | Upload your own

Related articles on the customer experience:

Magic Spots in The Customer Experience
A Remarkable Customer Experience
Marketing Multiplier #2 – The Customer Experience

Let future articles from The Marketing Spot come to you: Receive by Email or Get The Marketing Spot in a blog reader