Customer experience matters when it comes to building a lasting brand

Experience matters. We live in an experience age and brands can no longer build strong positions by providing clear functional benefits. In research I undertook with a former colleague, Professor Peter Darke at York University, and then student and now professor at Queens University, Laurence Ashworth, we showed that exposing consumers to irrelevant experiential cues, e.g., asking consumers to listen to music genres they liked versus disliked on a given portable CD player influenced their choice of portable CD players.

Consumers chose CD players that were objectively inferior on functional benefits like battery life and weight, two important characteristics of portable CD players, when they listened to disliked music genres on them, even though the music experience was irrelevant to choice. Consumers would, after all, never listen to a disliked genre of music on the CD player once they took it home!

Notwithstanding such research or the general discussion of how we live in an experience economy and how this matters so much - particularly in the service business in Asia - service businesses do not seem to have understood the importance of experience in building brands. Consider three recent experiences of mine at two leading Singapore retailers and a bank.

In the first case, I visited Takashimaya, an up-market Orchard Street retailer in Singapore, to buy a pair of dress shoes. Having looked at the various shoe brands and models on display, I selected three pairs and approached a salesperson asking them to get me those shoes in my size for me to try them on. To my surprise the salesperson told me that I was asking the wrong person, since he was representing a brand that I had not chosen.

It turned out that I had to find the right salesperson for each shoe brand I had picked up and ask him/her to help get the right size to try. I walked out, dress shoe unbought!

Or consider a visit to Tangs, another up-market retailer on Orchard Street in Singapore, last month. I was looking for a masticating juicer. The experience was the same. Each brand had its own salespeople and one could not get service to look across brands, the normal way consumers make a choice, without having to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy locating the right salespeople.

Moreover, given their vested interest in their own brand, they all give a distorted and self-serving picture of the brand they are selling. Worse still, for a somewhat technical product like a masticating juicer, I found the salespeople in Singapore rather inept. Armed with my internet searches of the product category and product reviews, I seemed to know more than the salespeople did! Once again I left without buying.