The Experience Effect

Overview

Customers don't just buy products. They buy an experience. Here's how to create one through your marketing.
The decision to pay money for a product or service is often based on more than just the product or service itself. Consumers care deeply about the overall experience of the buying process: They respond to the marketing message, the advertising, the sales approach, the website, the interaction with company personnel, and more.

When all these elements come together to form a seamless experience, the customer is left with a feeling of satisfaction that ultimately builds loyalty. Jim Joseph calls this ideal combination the "experience effect,? and in this book he shows how any business can create one for its brand. Filled with practical advice and real-life examples, The Experience Effect shows readers how to:

Understand their brand's target audience • Conduct more effective market research • Connect with customers on an emotional level • Establish appropriate and engaging customer touchpoints • Link digital and nondigital media • Perform a gap analysis of their brand's marketing • And more

Whatever the business, whatever the size, The Experience Effect will help companies create a simple yet powerful brand experience that resonates purpose fully, consistently, and continuously with customers.

About the Author

JIM JOSEPH (New York, NY) is an award-winning marketing professional who specializes in building consumer brands. His client experience includes blockbuster brands like Kellogg's, Kraft, Cadillac, Tylenol, Clean & Clear, and Wal-Mart.

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Review Quotes

"He will make you think and change how you act and for a marketing book that is the ultimate praise." —DTC Perspectives

"The Experience Effect takes marketers through every step of constructing an experience that expresses a clear, meaningful brand impression and then reinforces it with each customer interaction....Based on real marketplace examples and results, The Experience Effect leads the way to securing customer loyalty, touchpoint by touchpoint, interaction by interaction, person by person." —Retail Observer

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Cover Copy

There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of strategies you could use to market your products or services. But unless those strategies are seamlessly integrated to create a lasting impression and a deep hold on your customer, your brand will never quite rise above the competition, and your business or service never shine like it should.

Whether it's online, offline, or at the retail level, The Experience Effect shows you how to link your advertising, packaging, website, messaging, and more to create a memorable and immensely appealing experience for customers. Packed with astute assessments of many of the brands that surround us in daily life—Pottery Barn, The Biggest Loser, Keebler, Marriott, and others—this clear, practical book helps you recognize the immense impact of branding and gives you deceptively simple, highly effective strategies for creating a consistent, compelling, and lasting "experience effect.?

Advance Praise for The Experience Effect

"Jim's sound advice and helpful tools will help any marketer wrestle with the ever-changing developments in the new economic reality. His approach to marketing based on funda?mentals can be applied to any new challenge that pops up.? — From the Foreword by Kevin Roberts, CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide

"I have worked with Jim for years. He was practicing integrated marketing long before anyone was calling it that. The Experience Effect takes his experience and brings integrated marketing to a whole new level.? — Ashley McEvoy, Worldwide President, Johnson & Johnson

"Sharp observations. Perceptive insights. Jim connects the dots to the full brand experience across multiple touchpoints, and leads marketers to understand how best to consistently manage that experience to achieve the brand image and loyalty they desire.? — Sion Boney, former President, Bristol-Myers Products

"Written in a breezy, accessible, down-to-earth style, The Experience Effect is a practical, informative guide to the consumer purchasing process. It's a must-read for marketers, brand communicators, public relations and advertising practitioners, and students in these fields.? — Mel Ehrlich, Professor of Communications, New York University

"An easy-to-read and entertaining look at the brand experience. Jim uses real-time examples to illustrate easy-to-apply tips for creating a more effective marketing plan.? — Sandy Uridge, Senior Director Consumer Promotion, Kellogg Company

"A rare combination of penetrating insight with common sense.? — Dick Thomas, Founder and CEO, Tris3ct, and former CEO, Arc North America

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Jacket Copy

In marketing, it may not matter how many advertisements or tweets you crank out. It may not even matter how great your product is. Because the truth is that when customers buy, they're not just buying your product or service—and they're not responding to a campaign of random marketing methods. What they're buying is a carefully crafted experience. And in this book, marketing master Jim Joseph lays out a simple, step-by-step plan for creating the kind of deeply satisfying experience that will drive customers to your brand again and again. Your marketing message, advertising, sales approach, website, Facebook presence, logo, packaging—these are the pieces of the puzzle that fit together as a seamless, compelling whole to create a consistent "experience effect.? (Or, all too often, they just don't come together.)

Consider the meticulously integrated, easy-to-navigate J.Crew branding experience, which links its catalog, website, and stores to create a strong, consistent branding experience that appeals intensely to its target audience. Then contrast that to the eroding Starbucks experience, which can be unpredictable from store to store, leaving longtime loyal customers doubting the brand.

You'll learn lessons from giants like these, as well as from smaller companies and neighborhood shops, as the author uncovers the elements of effective branding. There's nothing gimmicky or jargon filled about The Experience Effect. Instead, it presents all the fundamental skills and processes essential for building or improving your brand, whether it's a restaurant, laundry detergent, boutique, charity, or any other product or service. You'll learn how to:

• Define your brand with clarity and accuracy, and compare it to similar brands

• Pinpoint and truly understand your target audience by using simple, grassroots-type research techniques

• Ensure your brand is rooted in the lifestyle of your customers, and satisfies their needs, desires, and behaviors

• Activate brand "touchpoints? that engage your customer both rationally and emotionally to generate unique interactions

• Tap into the power of Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other low-cost options to market your brand

• Test your touchpoints to make sure they work and guarantee that the experience effect you've created belongs to your brand alone

These are practical, powerful business practices that work time and again. When executed well, their simplicity and elegance are striking, and the experience effect they create so immense that, as the author says, "it can ultimately bring calm and stability to an otherwise oversaturated life.? Create the experience effect for your customers and you'll forge the strongest, most strategically based consumer connections that a brand can have—the essence of great marketing.

Jim Joseph serves as the President of Cohn & Wolfe North America, the agency's largest region. With over 25 years of integrated marketing, public relations and branding experience, Jim provides strategic oversight, client service and drives new business across all offices in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. He has created seamless brand experiences for clients such as Kellogg's, Kraft, Ikea, Cadillac, Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson, Clean & Clear, American Express and WalMart.

Prior to joining Cohn & Wolfe, Jim served as President and Partner of Lippe Taylor, where he led the agency in marketing to women for clients like Nestle and David's Bridal. Jim re-engineered Publicis' Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness, where he led the transformation of the agency from a traditional pharmaceutical advertising model to an award-winning, full-spectrum health and wellness marketing agency. Jim also established and grew his own marketing services agency (CPPartners), which sold to Publicis in 2002.

Jim is a daily blogger about marketing and teaches two intensive marketing classes at New York University, the first now in its fourth semester. He is a graduate of Cornell University and also received an MBA from Columbia University. In his spare time, when not working with his team, blogging or spending time with his family, you can find Jim running along the Hudson River with Lady Gaga in ear!

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Excerpt

INTRODUCTION: Marketing Is a Spectator Sport--Observing, Learning, and Then Applying

We interact with brands all the time, whether we consciously

realize it or not. Some brands we've been loyal to for

years (like a favorite shampoo or pair of jeans), and some we are

just discovering for the very first time (like a new enhanced water

drink or a new electronic device). Some we don't even know are

brands (like our favorite singer or a local restaurant)! Our interactions

can run the gamut from amazing to just okay to disappointing

to completely horrible.

Like clicking on a banner ad that takes you to a website where

you find the perfect item you didn't even realize you wanted, in a

cool color you didn't even realize existed, and discovering that it

comes with free shipping—coincidently only on orders placed that

day! Pretty amazing. Or stopping at your favorite coffee shop,

noticing that it's a lot messier than it used to be, getting the wrong

flavor added to your usual coffee drink, and then being charged 67

cents more than usual. Very disappointing.

These kinds of interactions are our personal experiences with

brands, and they completely shape our perceptions. They influence

our feelings about the brand, good or bad, whether we realize

it or not. These experiences define our thoughts, attitudes, and

behaviors toward brands and the value that they bring to our lives.

In a sense, how we experience the brand, how we feel the

brand, and how we choose to interpret the brand actually

becomes the brand to us. This is The Experience Effect, and

throughout the book we'll be exploring the effect that brand experiences

have on consumers.

At the crux of good marketing is the conscious and methodical

process of determining exactly the kind of brand to offer consumers

and exactly the kind of experience to create for them—and

then developing it consistently across every facet of the marketing

plan: from obvious marketing elements like packaging and advertising,

to the not so obvious elements like customer service representatives,

the CEO's weekly blog, or a branded Twitter presence.

The essence of good marketing is creating a consistent brand

experience with each specific consumer interaction.

In The Experience Effect, I will walk you through that conscious

and methodical process step by step, chapter by chapter. By the

end, we will have mapped out a consistent and ownable brand

experience for the entire marketing plan.

We will also be exploring a lot of examples here. Some of the

examples will be personal, and some observational. Some we'll

explore in depth, and others will be brief mentions to help make a

point. I love looking at and analyzing examples of good and bad

marketing, and you'll get a load of them in this book. Marketplace

examples help bring to life the principles of marketing that are

otherwise left to theory. When we observe marketing theory

applied in the real world to real brands, we can learn from both

the successes and mistakes of others and apply what we've

learned to our own marketing challenges.

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The Experience Effect

Overview

About the Author

Review Quotes

Cover Copy

Jacket Copy

Excerpt

Table of Contents

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