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Attract Your Dream Customer
Have you clearly defined your target audience? These are the prime buyers of your products or services. It is the people or organizations you are pursuing actively as customers. You don't need every customer in the world! You need the ones who...
Branding Fiasco -- Better Be Who You Say You Are!
Our experience as customers offers great instruction into the concept of branding. Come with me on a recent "experience" and you'll see what I mean. Here's the situation: I want to order an 800 number. On my AT&T bill is a customer services number....
Get Out of Your Head to Improve Your Business
The classic novel by Robert Louis Stevenson tells the story of
one man's struggle with his duel personalities - Dr Jekyll, the
kind and respected physician, and the violent Mr Hyde.
But if you think living as two separate people is hard,...
I'm Talking, But is Anyone Listening?
Internet marketing is a wonderful thing, but it has it's drawbacks. For instance, if you own a brick and mortar store you have a *physical* presence that gets noticed. Customers will find you purely by chance by walking or driving down the...
So you're thinking of having your own website?
If you’re daydreaming about having your own website and you’re reasonably new to the world of computers and the internet, there are a few basic things you really should consider first. I’ve listed 10 baby steps to take first that could possibly...
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Creating an Irresistible Brand
Why you should be using TouchPoint branding to ensure customer
loyalty.
Hard times create amazing successes.
Despite all the talk today of an oversupply of goods and
services, industry consolidation, menacing imports, stalled
prices, and shrinking margins, a few remarkable businesses have
discovered how to make their brands irresistible to more and
more customers. And they have done it in remarkably speedy
fashion, seemingly coming out of nowhere to virtually own their
markets. Consider, for example, Google, which went from being a
nonsense word to a global verb and supernova of the Internet in
only three years, which then led to its becoming a publicly
traded company with an $80 billion market cap.
Or how about the gizmo named TiVo, which changed television
viewing forever for millions of American families by creating
buzz outside the typical sales and marketing channels.
Dozens of similarly surprising brands -- names like American
Girl, Best Buy, Chico's, Hardiplank, and Washington Mutual --
are thriving in all sorts of sectors, from manufacturing to
wholesale to retail, and they have been built far more quickly
and inexpensively than brands that rely solely on traditional
approaches, most notably advertising. How do these luminaries do
it? They overpromise and they overdeliver.
It's a new, faster, and less-expensive approach to beating the
competition that I call TouchPoint Branding. Simply put, they
have made big promises to their customers, and they are
delivering on them in big ways at three important points of
interaction.
TouchPoint Branding begins with a unique, attention-grabbing
brand promise that radically differentiates a company from its
competitors. Google, for instance, vows to lead you to virtually
anything you want to know, in 0.2 seconds. TiVo's pledge is: TV
-- your way! American Girl promises dolls that enchant girls and
teach them how to live a life of substance. And in a glutted
business environment in which everyone seems to be shouting the
same message simultaneously and at peak volume, exciting,
breakthrough brand promises are the best way to
stand out from
the crowd. New companies must develop unique brand promises just
to battle their way into the marketplace.
Established businesses, faced with fighting off upstarts and
differentiating themselves from their rivals, have to
periodically overhaul their brand promises to adjust to changes
in their environments, their competitors, and their customers.
But simply coming up with a unique brand promise, or
overpromise, isn't enough. When you overpromise, you will be
saying that you are confident your brand will perform. You will
be putting your whole reputation for honesty on the line, making
a solemn contract with hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions
of customers. And, as wise managers know, trust is the hard
currency of business success. The price for squandering it --
sabotaging a brand's promise -- is always too high to pay,
because, at the end of the day, the priceless intangible called
integrity is the richest asset on any company's balance sheet.
After a brand promise has been clearly established, you must
also overdeliver by keeping your promises in imaginative,
dynamic, and unique ways. And to do that, managers will need to
get their entire organizations aligned to execute that big
promise flawlessly and, above all, consistently every day with
every sale or interaction. You must give your customers more
than they ever expected from you at each of three critical
moments of interaction -- the Product TouchPoint, the Human
TouchPoint, and the System TouchPoint. That's where your
advantage over competitors will emerge.
When properly executed, TouchPoint Branding enables managers at
every level to inspire their employees to overdeliver on the
company's brand promise. This is the breakthrough that can
revitalize your company, just as it has propelled the
trailblazers I've written about here.
About the author:
Create breakthrough brands and deliver extraordinary customer
experiences with tips from Rick Barrera's new book, Overpromise
and Overdeliver; The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty.
Free excerpt available at http://www.overpromise.com the
Overpromise Website
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