Make Your Brand Matter

Combine brand and experience into a single, exciting whole to drive growth

The Digital Transformation era has come and gone. Experiential concepts like personalization, transparency, transference, uniquity, and immediacy are now table stakes in an increasingly connected and responsive market. Companies that failed to ante up are already gone—or fading fast.

In Make Your Brand Matter, serial entrepreneur and brand strategist Steve Soechtig delivers an eye-opening discussion of the post-Digital Transformation era in which we now live. The book walks you through the evolution of brand and experience, leveraging examples of historical and digitally native brands that have succeeded and failed to seize the digital moment.

You’ll discover brands that enabled new customer acquisition, customer value optimization, and customer loyalty, all the while realizing that brand and experience are two sides of the same coin. The book also offers:

• Strategies, techniques, and activities for teams to capture digital opportunities
• Discussions of why brand and experience reinforce one another and how experiences must embrace, reflect, and enforce brand identity
• Tactics to accelerate the customer’s progression from evaluator to loyal advocate

Make Your Brand Matter is an essential resource for marketing professionals. It also belongs on the bookshelves of company founders, owners, managers, executives, and other business leaders seeking to develop their organization’s ability to marry brand and experience into one coherent and exciting package.

Introduction xi

Better Lucky Than Good xiii

What to Expect from This Book xvii

Chapter 1

A Far Too Brief History of Brand Strategy 1

The Emergence of Modern Brand Strategy 2

The Intersection of Brand and Experience 3

The Criticality of Experience 10

Chapter 2

The Dawn of Digital 15

The Birth of the Internet 17

Online Advertising Begins 18

Personalization of the Online Customer Experience 19

The E- Mail Explosion 23

Customer Expectations and Technological Innovation 25

Emerging from the Digital Transformation Era 29

Chapter 3

Focusing on the Modern Consumer 31

Millennial Expectations 32

Generation Z Expectations 35

The Customer Funnel 36

Awareness 37

Evaluation 40

Transactions 43

Engagement 44

Loyalty 45

Chapter 4

Believing in Your Brand and Redefining Your Strategy 47

Experience Defines the Brand 48

Building a Culture Through Data Analytics and Engagement 53

Location Through Data Analytics 55

Leveraging Technology to Drive Engagement and Growth 56

Turning Brand Promise into Reality 58

Chapter 5

Selling Experiences, Not Products 61

Commoditized Brands Become Invisible 62

Customers Control Branding 63

Replacing Products with Experiences 64

A Foundation of Innovation and Performance 65

Creating an Engaged Community 69

Pivoting to Gain Market Share 74

The Fusion of Digital and Physical Personalization 76

Customer Connection, Personalization, and Omnichannel Strategy 81

Chapter 6

Time Is the New Currency – Anticipating without Being Invasive 85

Collapsing Time 86

Time- Saving Conveniences 90

Data- Driven Innovations 93

Making Quick Service Quicker 97

Post- Digital Data and Loyalty 101

Four Time- Based Lessons 103

Chapter 7

Finding a Novel Approach to Solving a Market Need 107

Ambassadors of Innovation 109

Strategic Innovations in CRM 112

Novel Omnichannel Engagement 116

Building Innovation into Your Brand Strategy 118

Chapter 8

Humanizing the Experience 123

Understanding People’s Needs 124

Expanding an Exclusive Market to Everyone 128

Human- First Engagement 130

Risking Controversies for Growth 134

Humanizing Effectively 137

Chapter 9

Connecting Your Customer with Your Cause 141

Embracing Corporate Social Responsibility 142

Shifting from Brand Identity to Social Cause 145

Authentic and Proactive Leadership 148

Engaging and Inspiring the Community 149

Committing to the Cause 151

Chapter 10

Looking to the Future 155

Innovation with a Large I 156

Predictions Sometimes Miss the Mark 157

Emerging Experience Trends 160

AI- Enabled Conversational Interfaces 161

Augmented Reality 166

The Metaverse and NFTs 169

Chapter 11

Where You Should Begin 179

Three Approaches to Assessments 179

Three Prerequisites for Assessments 181

Three Areas of Assessments 182

Agile Experience Innovation 184

Notes 187

About the Author 197

Index 199

STEVEN G. SOECHTIG has worked for several industry-leading brand and experience strategy firms throughout his career. He has served as CEO of Ogilvy Experience, as an Expert Partner at McKinsey & Company, and as a Managing Director at Deloitte Digital. In each role, Steve has been instrumental in the creation and expansion of the Digital Experience practice, working closely with marketing and digital leaders to shape their strategies and drive both top-line growth and unparalleled customer loyalty.

Talk of digital transformation is becoming cliché. The truth is that the era of digital transformation is already over. Those firms that failed to acknowledge and harness the power of digital technologies are dead or dying, while those that effectively transformed their business processes and models to align with digital capabilities are encountering new challenges and obstacles in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

In Make Your Brand Matter: Experience-Driven Solutions to Capture Customers and Keep Them Loyal, eminent brand and experience strategist Steve Soechtig delivers an essential and thought-provoking discussion of building and maintaining an impactful brand in the post-digital transformation era. In the book, the author walks you through the evolution of brand and experience, from the perspectives of digitally native and historical brands who have succeeded — or failed — to capture the loyalty of modern consumers.

Arguing that brand and experience are two sides of the same coin, the book explores case studies of firms that enabled new customer acquisition, customer value optimization, and customer loyalty by focusing on experiential concepts like personalization, transparency, transference, uniquity, and immediacy.

You’ll find concrete strategies and hands-on techniques for accelerating your customers’ progression from evaluators to loyal brand advocates and consider insightful discussions of why brand and experience reinforce one another. You’ll learn why a customer’s experience in dealing with your company must embrace, reflect, and reinforce brand identity.

A can’t-miss resource for marketing professionals, founders, executives, managers, and other business leaders, Make Your Brand Matter is an essential guide to aligning how the world sees and interacts with your firm and how your organization cultivates and expresses its brand.

Discover why brand and experience are two sides of the same coin — and how to transform each of them

Make Your Brand Matter is your organization’s personal roadmap to aligning how customers view — and interact with — your company and how your firm projects itself out into the world. It is an expert demonstration of how to align your company’s brand with customer experience, enabling you to acquire new customers, increase the value of existing clients, and improve customer loyalty.

You’ll learn to use experiential concepts like transference, transparency, uniquity, personalization, and immediacy to connect to an increasingly demanding and sophisticated public. You’ll also discover how to rapidly transform a customer from a brand evaluator to a loyal advocate.

This book is filled with hands-on strategies your team can use to capture existing digital opportunities — and create new ones — and offers illuminating case studies of historical and digitally native brands that succeeded (or failed) to seize the digital moment.

Make Your Brand Matter belongs in the libraries of founders, executives, managers, and other business leaders seeking a competitive advantage in an economic arena filled with increasingly nimble and capable opponents. By the end of the book, you’ll understand how to marry your company’s brand and customer experience into one coherent and exciting package.