This Wednesday’s Showcase: The Experience Map
As a dedicated reader of Logic+Emotion, I could not resist placing this perspective of building out experiences in the most general forms. David Armano, shows at a 10,000 foot view of how someone might consider going about defining experiences and building them out within their marketing organizations and the campaigns that they create. Take a peek below:
The Experience Map
I really like what David has done here to communicate the essentials to creating experiences. You can view this and many more of David’s pieces here at Logic+Emotion. One thing I would like to see in an evolved version of this is how customer expectations drives this map. In a map I created a while back called “Customer Experience and Expectation Model, customer expectations drive the actual creation of better customer experiences long term.
In terms of Customer Engagement, experience creation actually falls under an umbrella called Experience Engagement which focuses on building out the true connections to people on multiple levels. Experience Engagement can be leveraged across multiple types of Customer Engagement methods. As its own bucket, experience engagement is one of the more nebulous aspects within today’s evolved version of marketing, Customer Engagement. More to come on this topic area in the near future, stay tuned!
Today is Wednesday and this is an incredibly innovative approach to communications
Below is a visual of Mullen’s 7 Modes of the Mind which I find quite intriguing and very clever in the way it conveys slivers of communication we receive as people.
7 Modes of the Mind by Mullen
I’d love to elaborate more, but I would be spoiling the greatness of this interactive site. Take and peek here to figure out more about these modes of the mind. They are very closely related to something called communication engagement, one of the subsets of customer engagement.
Today is Wednesday and Choosing Colors for Your Brand can be very Difficult!
A Guide to Choosing Brand Colors
This weeks design wonder comes from the UsabilityPost. In the post titled “A guide to Choosing Colors for Your Brand,” the author of the post, Dmitry, shares with us the key aspects when considering and building a brand logo. According to Dmitry, “colors will evoke certain emotions and feelings towards your brand so it is vital to choose a color that will represent your identity effectively.” That got me thinking about how people are affected by brands that engage them (you could literally hear the hamster wheel start moving as I started to think more about this topic.)
In terms of customer engagement, what are brands saying indirectly by the colors they choose for their logos, materials, presentations and more? How is it impacting the overall perceptions of the brand? And more importantly, does this selection in color really engage or deter customers? Knowing how deep this topic could go, I decided to keep it short and simple with the following things to consider.
Determining what Color Suits Your Customer & Your Brand
Also provided in a link on Dmitry’s post is an interactive site called Cymbolism that takes a posted word and asks you, the user, to associate a color to it when you think of that word. Once you click on a color, it records your answer. After this, take a peek at the bottom of the screen and you can see what other colors have been selected for this word by other users. If you are curious about other words, take a peek at the Words tab and click on the words there.
So what’s the big idea behind this site? Consider user generated responses to colors and the words associated to them. How much is that worth to your brand? How does these perceptions affect any future developments of your brand? A concept the one provided by Cymbolism, is vital in creating that feeling and connectivity that is associated with your brand image.
Implications for Customer Engagement
So how does this apply to engaging customers on a much broader scale? The impact of colors on people/customers is also a deeper part of one subset of customer engagement known as brand engagement. Gallup Organization’s William J. McEwen defines this in a broader sense and has even written a book called “Married to the Brand.” The book’s primary purpose is to “tell the story of what makes profitable brand relationships work — through the eyes of the consumer, not the marketer.” This means that being able to engage consumers goes above and beyond marketing itself, its about the people that make the brand not the brand making the people.
Post Resources
If you are interested in great design best practices, take a peek at the UsabilityPost by Dmitry.
If you are interested in the interactive color association site, take a peek at Cymbolism.
If you want to learn more about brands and how people are associated to them, take a peek at Gallup’s book on Married to the Brand.
Today is Wednesday and…”Here is a Marketing Ecosystem.”
On today’s focus of the week, is a highly diverse and complex marketing ecosystem diagram developed by Mullen. This not so little graph is chalked full of virtually every channel in marketing. Take a peek below at this incredibly overwhelming world of marketing.
The Marketing Ecosystem by Mullen
There are several things I’d like to talk about related to this concept but that will be saved for a future date. The two things that you might consider keeping in mind is “Why is marketing incredibly siloed and complex?” I thought all marketing channels impacted one or another in some form or another. Another thing to think about if you are working for an executive in the marketing department is “What can you do to make this easier to understand and leverage?”
In the coming weeks, a customer engagement map concept will be introduced to show the holistic picture of each channel and their relative affiliation to the other kinds of channels.
For your own map and information about the creators of this ingenious design, please visit Mullen.
Today is Wednesday and…this is “A Model of The Creative Process”
This week’s focus hinges on the very concept of listening and applying these insights into ingenious and carefully crafted messaging that feeds one of the cores of customer engagement. Hailing from the Dubberly Design Office in San Francisco, California, is “A Model of the Creative Process,” which can be seen below.
A Model of the Creative Process
As artistic as it is insightful, this poster sized vision of how the creative process works does more than just talk about what goes into creating those awesome messages, ads and much more that engage the very people that brands want to expand their brand communities with. This map literally provides us with the basis of the “why” behind certain ads or messaging.
I’d like to draw focus to three key areas I believe are critical in making this process viable in today’s engaged customer environment. These three areas are labeled in the center as “Observe,” “Reflect” and “Make.” These key pieces in this model are the basis of why we focus heavily on listening in virtually every channel that marketing leverages. A simple example can be seen in social media; companies actively strive to obtain and retain a prominent presence on relevant channels in which their customers collaborate openly and freely about experiences. These regular collaborations can lead to something better for not only the brand, but even for the customer. Do you want to know what it is? It’s a relationship that grows in a similar fashion as a friend, colleague and more, just with a brand on a much more individualized level.
With this relationship, brands can better serve you in their messaging, offers, creative imagery and much more just by simply listening. Just think about it and how it relates to you. What are some things you have experienced because of a brand’s willingness to listen to your concerns or suggestions? How were they able to improve their messaging? Was their offer better? Or better yet, how about their advertisement to you? Did it make a home run with you? Let me know how this impacted you. Here’s how an experience of offering suggestions to two brands eons ago (more like 2 1/2 years ago) that impacted me as a prospect and brand enthusiast.
In the coming weeks as the Customer Engagement Series ramps back up, I’ll show how this and other segments of everyday marketing, portrayed in these awesome diagrams, fits into today’s marketing ecosystem or what I’d like to refer to as “The Customer Engagement Ecosystem.”
Please take a chance to browse The Dubberly Design Office website and check out some more enlightening images of skillfully crafted concepts and ideas.
Enjoy!
