Belongingexperiences

The factors outlined are based on key mega-trends and consumer need states that are currently being channelled to impact everyday lives, and highlight the need for a “Belonging Experience”. Let’s look at just a few implications that you can harness within your organization.Evolve Offering, Restructure Processes

Organizations need to evolve their approach from the transaction-focused aspect of selling products to providing added value services that are built on the customer’s hunger for collaboration and dialogue. Leading edge organizations have already started leveraging these added value services by offering knowledge-based services that clearly tap an unmet consumer need for control.What aspect of your organization is focused around knowledge, and how you leverage this aspect of your brand to build engagement amongst customers is becoming the real value. A great example has been in the technology retailing industry with the recent acquisition of Geek Squad by Best Buy. The added branded service leverages knowledge of how to set up networks, systems, and IT programs within your house or office. Although Geek Squad does sell products, its true value to consumers is knowledge that has a dollar value equation.

Leverage the Experience as a Doorway to Empowering Consumers

Review the current physical manifestation of your brand to identify areas of opportunity where knowledge and understanding are the key factors in transforming consumer needs into aspirational desires for knowledge and self-awareness.What are the key transactional processes that you need to retain, and what are those that allow you to evolve to take advantage of how consumers seek information? What new aspects of your consumer experience do you need to add to give your organization credibility to sell knowledge? What type of knowledge is the consumer seeking, and how can you best deliver this information within your environment? We need to think beyond signing and in-store conventional communication, since these tools do not create a changed behaviour or effectively communicate new innovative ways to think.The true opportunity is to disrupt the way consumers interact with your brand in order to create a new behavioural platform that will allow for a new understanding and empowering process. We need to think about how the physical aspect translated by all of the senses can play a role in changing behaviour, and create a doorway to the acceptance and willingness to pay for knowledge.Currently, very few retailers or service organizations have been able to break through to gain ground in this opportunity. Another dimension is the ability of organizations to clearly understand key hidden and stated need states that are currently not being met by competitors. Establishing a better understanding of consumer needs is the surest way of building a strong brand experience and providing permission to sell knowledge as a value proposition.

HR -  A Key Factor for Change

A key factor in ensuring the experience delivers on the need for consumers to feel empowered is a rethinking of the role of in-the-trenches staff in building this bridge from the tangible to the intangible. The expression “What gets measured gets done” could not be more applicable to changing established behaviours within organizations.As humans, we are all reluctant to change since it offers a certain level of risk. Organizations that want to transform their operations into a knowledge-centric, consumer-empowering process will need to re-evaluate their hiring, training and operational practices to determine how the front-line staff can live the new brand experience and promise.Creating a physical change in the environment they operate is just one of the steps required to make the transformation a success. Developing clear performance metrics and success criteria that are evaluated on an on-going basis are additional tools that will be required and form the foundation for defining progress.

Redefine the Definition of Target Groups

In order to build a house on solid foundation, it is important that we review current customer target group information in order to better define the profiles based on cognitive, aesthetic and self-actualization human needs. Through the use of research tools that clearly identify consumers’ unmet emotional and rational needs, we can better understand how these can be clustered as part of like-minded communities that share similar lifestyle and culture needs.Our experience has identified that such research and re-evaluation of the target groups demonstrates that age and gender may not be the only discriminators for how consumers respond to your brand. For example, the growth of business ownership by women, the increased buying power of homosexual consumers, and the growth of importance and active participation of consumers in social issues ranging from HIV to the climate changes has demonstrated that shared values play a critical role in how we view brands and the world.

Explore the Full Consumer Touch-Point Continuum

The new “Belonging Experience” occurs well before and well after the actual physical experience occurs. Understanding how you foster a sense of community at all of the consumer touch-points is critical. In order to draw your communities’ attention to the fact that your experience has changed and the offering has evolved beyond transactional services or discounted products, you will need to disrupt their current perceptions of your organization at every contact point, challenging their current beliefs.The use of an integrated communication program that talks to the hidden needs of customers in a way that disrupts their current thinking is a very effective tool. A recent Scotia Bank campaign “You are richer than you think” has been very effective in getting customers to think differently about their conventional bank transaction. It sets up the financial institution in a different light, establishing a higher level of confidence for the client through the access of a second opinion.