Brand Matters

One of the great things about the Internet, is that there are many, many ways for your customers to make themselves heard. Even better, if you are paying attention, you can measure it. Most websites provide the ability to contact the company via email, or phone or in person. For the most part, these avenues are useful and necessary but will never tell the whole story about how your customers feel.

Blogs, Tweets, Review Sites and other channels often provide a very public forum for sharing opinions about a company or it's products. These channels can be extremely valuable if you are paying attention. Of course monitoring multiple channels of communication for any company can be overwhelming, especially as you compound the situation by targeting multiple audiences, across multiple product lines in multiple countries.

The only reasonable way to leverage all of the avenues of communication is to maintain a strong and consistent sense of brand, and the manifestation of that in the user experience. If in this case communication is about a company communicating with a customer, there needs to be only one voice (regardless of the channel) representing the company. Brand is the one persona that really matters. If you can engage your customers in one conversation, even if there are several topics, you can maintain a much better sense of your market perception than if you allow many independent disconnected conversations to represent you. Measurement against key elements of your brand identity can be applied across your channels to optimize the performance of your message regardless of how a customer chooses to receive it. The validation of the approach will be evident in the 3rd party sites, comments, reviews or tweets and how closely they resemble your internal brand message.

The easy route is to allow each channel or conversation to stand on its own, the result is a very complicated or even conflicting presentation of your company to the marketplace. The harder route is to simplify your brand message to its core elements, and then apply it across your interactions with the market. If you want your customers to truly understand your company's message, and ultimately your differentiation from your competition, you need to be consistent and clear.