Excerpts

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. Excerpted from The Experience Effect: Engage Your Customers with a Consistent and Memorable Brand Experience by Jim Joseph All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.