Marketing used to be all about the art of communicating a brand message to, hopefully, the right audience at the right time and place.

Today, whilst the business of crafting a brand hasn’t gone away, marketing is now a ubiquitous 360-degree game focused on the quality and relevance of the customer experience.

In our social media world there’s no value in communicating a blue sky brand promise, but delivering thunder and lightning thanks to ad hoc internal disconnects.

Forrester Research says there is a powerful correlation between consumers’ ratings of how “useful,” “easy,” and “enjoyable” their experiences have been and their loyalty

If customers find a product or service useful, usable, and enjoyable, they will want to buy it again, and are not likely to switch to a competitor.

Simple words aren’t they, useful, usable and enjoyable?

However, few companies deliver.

Former prominent Forrester Research analyst and now the principal of his own consultancy, the Temkin Group, Bruce Temkin, sums up the challenge:

“No matter how much money you spend on advertising, you can’t convince customers that you provide better experiences than you do. It’s amazing how little discipline companies have in their approach to customer experience while at the same time acknowledging it as both critical and broken.”

Our goal must be to deliver and sustain differentiated experiences that nurture loyalty.

Authentic brands are more than just marketing slogans, they’re the fabric that aligns all employees and stakeholders with customers in the pursuit of a common cause.

In fact, talking about customer management is relatively straightforward. The difficulty is in the execution and that’s why it is powerful foundation for sustainable competitive advantage.

And whilst your data, business technology and analytics must be synchronized and aligned, the core focus has to be on your management culture and organisational health.

• Efficient experience is not equal to effective experience
• An experience is not effective unless it is remembered, branded and contrasted