Truly Deeply/Madly

Have you ever played the old par­lour game of ‘Whis­pers’ where one per­son whis­pers a phrase to you and you pass it on, by whis­per, to the next person. After 6 or 7 rounds ‘I have a square’ becomes  ‘a star’. It’s a demon­stra­tion of how the intent behind a mes­sage can be lost in tran­si­tion if there is not some­one stand­ing between the indi­vid­ual whis­per­ers cor­rect­ing them.

Early in my mar­ket­ing career it struck me that the same dis­tor­tion of mes­sage hap­pens when we are try­ing to take our cus­tomers from one end of the pur­chase process to the other — from a vague inter­est or need  for our prod­uct to pur­chase. At each stage the cus­tomer makes deci­sions about your brand and prod­uct that deter­mine whether you make it to the next stage. Trusting to luck and leav­ing  your mes­sage to find its own way through the pur­chase process is fraught with danger.

The savvy mar­keter knows you need to man­age every aspect — the brand mes­sage and voice, the value propo­si­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­tent — at every stage to ensure you get the best bang for your mar­ket­ing buck. You need to look at each stage, at every touch­point and iden­tify which aspects of your mes­sage need dial­ing up and which down, in order that you can remain in the process.

As a next step you then need to design com­mu­ni­ca­tions that best deliver the appro­pri­ate mes­sage at each stage, per­haps a phone follow-up to sales enquiry, an e-mail cam­paign to peo­ple who have asked for a quote, a leaflet explain­ing jar­gon at the point they are explor­ing products…the fun is in iden­ti­fy­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tion gaps and find­ing ways to fill them.

Review­ing your pur­chase process might seem ardu­ous but you could be miss­ing a sim­ple fix that could really impact your bot­tom line sales — imag­ine if your con­ver­sion rate went from 1 to 2%.

As an mar­keter I have found this approach incred­i­bly pow­er­ful . Sim­ply put, this is how I view the com­mu­ni­ca­tions process.

Know­ing the process is only part of the answer, you then have to work with other tal­ented peo­ple to make it work.
Here at Truly Deeply we are devoted to ensur­ing our clients stay true to their brand strat­egy, brand essence and core mes­sage in every­thing they do. If you would like to talk to us about how we can fool-proof your pur­chase process why not give us a call.

Mal­colm Har­vey
Client Expe­ri­ences Direc­tor and Direct Mar­ket­ing go-to guy.

Tags: Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Experience, Brand Personality, Brand Strategy, brand-marketing, brand-messaging, Brands, Client-Experiences-Director, communication-content, communications-process, Corporate Image, Design, Direct-marketing, end-to-end-process, Malcolm Harvey, purchase-process, Truly Deeply, value-proposition, whispers

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 9:24 am and is filed under Brand Strategy, Brand Voice, Brand-Storytelling, Corporate Image, Experiences, Thinking, Visual Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.