Navigating brands through an explosion of digital touchpoints

Author
Lionell Schuring
Publication Date
16 November 2021

Navigating brands through an explosion of digital touchpoints

Creating and maintaining a strong brand has never been easy. Year after year studies show about 80% of brands could disappear next week and no one would care. And now our evolving digital lifestyles have made it even much, much harder.

The ways customers engage with brands has changed. It’s less predictable, which makes it less controllable, and that evolution has turned the traditional siloed model of brand work and user experience on its head.

Thirty seconds might have been enough time to make a promise during a highly-produced television spot, but an explosion of digital touchpoints has made it harder than ever to live up to those promises.

The buying journey is non-linear

Hundreds of interactions make up a customer’s experience and form their perception of a brand. Increasingly, these touchpoints are happening outside the traditional linear buying journey.

Even more challenging is that some of these touchpoints are disintermediated, tucked away in another brand’s experience, completely outside your own brand’s control and well beyond the influence of a disconnected marketing campaign.

People want to control how they connect with your brand. And that adds weight to each potential interaction.

Every moment is “make or break”

If you create an experience that doesn’t engage the customer and meet their expectations, you push them toward the waiting arms of your competition. Every disconnected experience, every delayed delivery, every aborted onboarding, every unresolved service damages your reputation. 

Adding to the difficulty, customers don’t just judge these moments of uncertainty against your direct competitors, but with every smooth and valuable digital experience they have gotten used to. So, while digital is improving people’s lives, companies that are unable to connect the dots actually see it destroying their brand.

The solution is something we at Mobiquity call brand gravity, helping brands turn a disjointed experience with zero gravitational pull into a fully immersive experience that attracts customers towards them.

Digital products have the ability to enhance brands, but only if you understand the human beings who use them. Brand gravity happens when digital products are built with full knowledge of the customer experience.

Be relevant or be forgotten

So, what separates the 20% of brands people would miss from the 80% they wouldn’t? What gives certain brands that sense of gravity most others lack?

Start with the things we know people care about. People care about the friction in their daily lives. Do your digital products add friction or reduce it?

Brands that survive over the next decade will be those in which strategy, design, build, and marketing work together to create relevancy in their customers’ lives.

If you break down traditional silos and create digital products that transcend transactions and enhance lifestyle, you’ll never have to wonder if customers would miss you. You’ll be here to stay.

Learn more about how to achieve brand gravity at Mobiquity.com.

Lionell Schuring

Lionell Schuring is Mobiquity Europe’s Chief Creative Officer and a member of the Europe Management Team. In this role, he seeks to close the gap between what brands promise and what people actually experience. Developing value propositions from strategy to concept to building and continuously expanding them. As head of the creative department, Lionell is responsible for creative output, talent recruitment, development, coaching, training and retention. Partnering closely with key leaders from other disciplines to keep elevating the quality of their work, managing client relationships and being hands-on in projects. Together with his fellow management team members, he is responsible for managing operations, supervising performance against agreed targets, developing go-to-market strategies and making Mobiquity an awesome place to work for everyone. He joined Mobiquity in December of 2017 after 17 years of working in the advertising industry for companies including Grey, Young & Rubicam and Ogilvy. Over the years his work has been featured on i.a. TechCrunch, Creativity, Forbes, CNet, Contagious, and honored by internationally acclaimed awards shows like the Cannes Lions, Clio Awards, EFFIE, London International and NY Festivals.

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