The majority of brand strategy focuses on the most visible areas, the logo, the homepage, the ad campaign. While they are important, they are also the areas where every competitor is focusing on. The true opportunity lies in all the other aspects of your business: the confirmation email, the shipping insert, the error page which is often overlooked. This is where lasting impressions are created.
Dead Zones in the Customer Journey
If there’s anyone in this world who does great work by turning on the charm and offering up little well-timed gestures, it’s the bartender. Marketers are starting to get it.
From Swag to Something Worth Keeping
Giveaway corporate swag has a bad rap. And frankly, it’s usually well-deserved. Cheap pens that run out of ink. Scratchy t-shirts that never get worn. Tote bags that fall apart after a single wash. Most promotional merchandise is either shoved in a drawer or given to Goodwill. That’s not brand loyalty. That’s brand waste.
The move to make, then, is from stuff-with-your-logo on it to stuff people find valuable. Quality, practical merchandise that fits into someone’s life doesn’t just stick in their mind, it fits into their day-to-day.
Custom socks are a prime case study for how that plays out in reality. Sock Fancy makes custom-branded socks that people actually want to rock, meaning that brand is in that individual’s, plus everyone they’re traipsing around, face over and over again. That’s earned media impressions. Zero ad spend required.
The principle holds for nearly all promo swag: decide whether you’d want to use it even if it had a brand slapped on the side. If the answer is yes, the logo is just a bonus. If the answer is no, your clients are throwing it in the trash.
The Peak-End Rule, Applied Practically
According to behavioral research, people remember experiences based on the peak moment and the ending. The peak-end rule suggests that we remember past experiences based on how they were at our most intense point and at the end, rather than as the sum total of the experience.
What it means in practice is that you need to identify a “peak” experience. It doesn’t have to be the most expensive moment of the customer journey, but it needs to be truly different from all the rest. Then you must ensure that the ending is the best it can be.
Unboxing, for instance, can become a natural peak if rethought. The moment you open your online order is a moment of excitement for most people. This intense burst of emotion can make your brand unforgettable. The ending can be the follow-up message or the post-purchase check-in.
Customers are far more likely to recall an experience if it was planned to be the peak and if the ending was a high experience too.
Personalization Beyond “Hi \[Name\]”
A lot of personalization in marketing is at a very superficial level. First name in the subject line, the occasional birthday email, a product recommendation that is based on the last thing that person bought. The problem with all of that is that consumers can see you doing it, and because you are investing nothing/very little in them, they probably don’t expect that much more in return.
The good version of this same kind of marketing is where you use behavioral data to inform you on what sort of physical surprises you should send. E.g customer bought three times in the last six months send something unexpected in their fourth delivery and customer bought a specific product category send a sample for the adjacent one they haven’t tried.
40% of consumers are more likely to make a repeat purchase from a merchant that offers premium or gift-like packaging. (Dotcom Distribution) That number likely undercounts the effect of unexpected personalization, because most customers have never actually experienced it.
The bottleneck here isn’t really the data most companies are knee-deep in unused customer data. The bottleneck is that most companies treat the physical in the guise of the marketing department as opposed to the operations one.
Why Tactile Still Wins in a Digital World
Digital marketing is fast, cheap, and easy to track. And it’s easily forgotten. No one saves a banner ad. A well-designed, tactile item is held onto.
The weight of a card is part of its message. The texture of a custom-wrapped package is part of the interaction. These sensations are processed differently in memory than an image on a screen; there’s plenty of actual research to indicate this, but anecdotal evidence works as well. People save things. People throw things away, all the time.
This isn’t an argument against digital. An omni-channel approach works because the two methods make each other more powerful. But the balance has been tilting so far to the side of digital that if you are willing to invest in tactile now, you have less competition in that space than you would have had a decade ago.
The brands that make an impact aren’t necessarily the ones with the most money. They’re the ones who found a medium nobody else was using and made the most of it.
