QA #4: What’s the difference between branding and CX?

To ease in the theme of creativity and branding (the first experience strategy pillar), we’ll look at a case study (DECIEM).

Yesterday, I gave the main questions and scope to think of customer experience. To sum up the main points were:

• Great service is a great starting point (and a difficult goal in itself), but at the end of the day the name of the game is differentiation and loyalty.
• A primer on measuring success: addressing CX in a specific way doubles down on retention (while avoiding falling in the acquisition cost trap) and focuses on “Customer Lifetime Value” or CLV. That’s a rough picture but that’s the main goal if we’re talking specific hard kpis. It’s obviously important but not the only measure you want to look at.
• A quickstart 3 big picture questions you need to constantly rerun when looking at your experience strategy:
• > how to provide a different experience that’s highly specific,
• > how to truly differentiate yourself
• > AND how to make people CARE about you (which is the holy grail connection you want to create with your clients)?

In the end, yes CX is about taking a client from point A to B without too much friction in order to create a smooth transaction, making sure the customers needs are met. But it’s ALSO about fulfilling something more: a brand promise (could be educating your clients about skincare or about sustainable clothes), a transformation (could be elevating their fitness journey through empowerment), and giving them an extra experience layer that creates moments that are valuable for people.

Let’s illustrate that more practically and IRL in today’s QA: what’s the difference between branding and CX?

To start with an anecdote that’s telling, the branding industry is evolving. Especially advertising / branding / communications agencies. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine working in an ad agency and who’s the lead in the strategy department. She was saying that she was currently lobbying to use “experience strategist” as titles in her department. Big deal right? It’s not but it kind of is. Because, yes, it’s just a title, but there is a transition going on about the nature and purpose of the work branding specialists are offering businesses. It’s less about the image, about creating campaigns and catch-phrases (tbh it hasn’t been about that in a while especially with UX and design thinking method becoming more trendy the past decade), and more about working on customer experience.

When we look at branding, ultimately a brand is here to make a promise.

Customer experience is here to embody that promise.

Both need to provide congruency for the client.

To be clearer, it means that words and signs need to be backed by actions, not just for the time of a (peripheral to business) campaign; it must be done in a way where people have a sense that that’s embedded in the business’ practices every single day. Or you must have a sense that the campaign is an experience that’s as valuable, that ‘ties in’ the products and services your company provides, and therefore “true”, and not gimmicky or for show (or LiEs).

Now. That’s a pretty neat theoretical definition, and reality is often much more complicated when it comes to delivering all that.

In practice when things get awry, it’s because, on the one hand you have the brand, which proposes ideas to the public; usually something new and/or aspirational for the customer (meaning something that does not exist yet or a state they aspire to). That’s basically the saying about brands creating new desires from nothing.

Customer experience, on the other hand, along with product development and user experience, usually takes the other route and caters to existing needs and sometimes desires (and most often focus on reducing friction which is not the same as desire).

Unfortunately, people prefer having both. (and I will die on that hill)

That’s somewhat of an oversimplification, agreed, but it’s worth pointing out because a lot of times, inside the business, between the differente functions in an organization (marketing, comms, product, sales, etc) or even with their agency partners, the frictions stem from this biased perspective.

However, when people inside the organization (and the businesses themselves), detach themselves from this perspective, and focus on aligning on the core purpose of the business, and the specific type of relationship they want to have with each of their clients individually, that’s when the magic happens.

Case in point: DECIEM and their Knowvember campaign-experience.

For those who don’t know, DECIEM is an umbrella skincare company that brings together different brands such as The Ordinary and it completely shook its industry when it first appeared in the market in 2013.

Last November 2021, instead of doing the usual Black Friday thing to either give a discount or reject it altogether, they decided to make something (‘Knowvember’) that would embody their brand promise — providing pared-down custom highly efficient skincare routines, and making customers highly-educated in their own skin — and the relationship they want to foster with their clients.

DECIEM is all about 1/ being your own expert, 2/ efficacy in skincare and 3/ consumption empowerment through knowledge.

The goal was to use the month of November to create content and events around skincare education and being transparent about the purpose and science behind all the DECIEM brands. You had videos from employees, IG stories and lives, PDF guides to focus on different themes (dryness, actives in skincare etc). *AND* 23% off everything on the shop with one day where you could NOT shop at all (black out friday) in order to raise awareness about mindful consumption.

So you could say this is a seasonal marketing / communication campaign. They’re going towards a new or aspirational form of consumption and leveraging their brand in that sense.

They also took their CX to the next level, and made that experience an integral part of the customer journey:

DECIEM already has a specific way of doing customer care and integrating it in the purchase journey. When you go on their e-store, you can chat with an expert who will build your personalized routine and explain the interactions between the products but most importantly the science behind, explanations behind why you’re skin has this or that. It’s not just a customer service line but as something that fulfills the brand’s mission and is a high value service in the customer journey.

The Knowvember campaign creates just another layer of experience that fuels the system with content to educate, therefore reinforcing the brand’s position on certain issues in the world (where the customers exist IRL) and overall purpose (the brand promise). From a CX perspective, it just builds upon what the brand already does (building your own expert custom routine) and enhances the type of qualitative relationship that supports both purchase (conversion) and brand loyalty (and customer lifetime value). It’s not just about boosting sales for a couple of weeks. It’s about the bigger picture and making it CONGRUENT for clients.

In the end, businesses like DECIEM that end up being “the world’s most popular skincare right now”, and basically build their own category, don’t just have a point of view to make them stand out.

They back it before, during and after any comms / PR / marketing campaign (and yes, they smartly emerge by leveraging the “pop up effect” which is the second pillar we’ll talk about after this one).

They know how to articulate it in a congruent way with every piece of their system, in a way that’s very identifiable. Each piece reinforces their message, their narrative, the transformation journey, in a way that’s palpable and “true” because it’s at every step of every single individual customer’s journey. That’s how they create a specific relationship, not just with words and feel good imagery, and that’s where the value is.

When businesses work in that way, branding and CX are one and the same. They aim to fulfill the promise: not from a 1000 feet above the ground aspirational dream land, and not just as a smooth uneventful A to Z transaction from a conversion / purchase perspective. They work on taking customers from point A to Z but from a bigger relational and transformational perspective that does more in the long run.

The usual PS:

“PREVIOUSLY…”: If you’re just landing here, and wonder what the 100 day pop up carnival is all about :

👉🏽 my intention with this challenge is creating a small public repository, in a corner of the Internet, for questions “experience makers” (broad umbrella term for whether you’re a UX designer, a marketing officer, entrepreneur or branding specialist) have in their work, while breaking down experience strategy / customer experience best practices into six pillars that anyone can practically use to their own ends.

👉🏽 I’m also inviting people here and on Linkedin and IG to connect together every Friday for a dose of #tgif quirkiness with the Wheel of Fortune 🎡 (special ‘prizes’ have included so far a ‘no fuss’ work along and a tarot reading for experience makers).

🎟 Catch up with the latest Friday WoF and get your tarot reading right in your inbox by clicking here:

📫CLICK AND COLLECT Your May Tarot reading for your 'Experience Maker' Sign