How Brand Impacts Sales Performance
A successful brand often influences an organisation’s performance, particularly when it comes to sales; they go hand-in-hand. But, there are key performance factors to consider when understanding how brand correlates with performance and what should be analysed when aiming to improve performance.
Differentiating Between Brand and Branding
The first thing that needs to be made clear is the difference between a ‘brand’ and ‘branding’. The terms are often used interchangeably, which depending on the context, can cause confusion.
A brand is an organisation’s reputation, how they are perceived by their audience, customer loyalty etc. — brand is driven by emotion. Branding, on the other hand, is a company’s logo, slogan, colour story, imagery etc. — it’s more visual.
An example of where the terms being used interchangeably is confusing is when a company ‘rebrands’. If we are speaking technically, and in the words of the legendary Seth Godin, they are not ‘rebranding’ they are ‘re-logoing’. In order to change a brand, more has to be done than just changing the logo; the perception of the audience has to shift.
Recently, Hermes ‘rebranded’ to Evri to try and hide their poor ‘brand’ and negative customer perception. They did this by ‘rebranding’ with a different logo, mission statement and company name. In actual fact, they ‘re-logoed’ as their audience’s brand perception remained the same.
It can be confusing when the terms are used in the same context, but understanding whether it is meant to spark emotion or a visual reaction can be a clear indicator as to whether the ‘brand’ or ‘branding’ is being discussed.
For the purposes of this content, we will be talking about brand i.e. emotional motivators.
Influencing Sales Through Nudge Points
The Marketing Funnel is a well-known tool in the industry to understand the process of taking a person from the very beginning of the buying journey to becoming a loyal customer and brand advocate.
However, the ‘thing’ that takes a person from one point in the journey to the next is called a nudge point, also known as a touchpoint. A nudge point is a term used throughout marketing to describe how to influence someone to take a desired action. In this case, it’s how someone makes a purchase and becomes a loyal, returning customer and brand advocate.
Unlike creating nudge points to make someone take action, for example, clicking on a Facebook Ad or visiting a website, sales nudge points are all about the entire customer journey from beginning to end.
Creating a Customer Journey
A customer journey is the experience someone goes through from first becoming aware of an organisation to converting to a loyal customer and brand advocate. The customer journey is all part of a company’s brand as it relates to the audience’s perception of it and sparking an emotional cue.
In an organisation, marketing is everyone’s responsibility whether they officially work in the department or not, because everyone has an influence on the customer journey and, therefore, a potential customer’s brand interpretation; everyone in an organisation plays a role in a customer’s brand experience.
Furthermore, if we are speaking about a supermarket for example, it’s the location of the store, parking facilities and ease of access, the number of trolleys available at a specific time, the cleanliness of the store, the uniform and presentation of the employees, the range of products, the organisation and display of the products, the product pricing, product offers, how easy products are to find, the queues at the checkouts, the payment options, the interaction and conversation with the checkout staff etc.
It even goes so far as the ‘actual’ marketing efforts, i.e. the product pricing labels on the shelves, the advertisements shown throughout the store, the design of the carrier bags etc. Even if an employee of the supermarket is not customer-facing, they play a critical role in the customer’s experience and journey from entrance to exit. These are all nudge points to encourage a person to convert — not one of these can be wholly responsible for the sale, they all play a role.
By creating a positive first customer journey, the customer is encouraged to return and if the same positive customer experience happens again, they are likely to come back a third time — this is how customer and brand loyalty is created.
Creating an Omni-Channel Experience
Allowing a customer to experience their journey through an omni-channel approach is another principal element when creating a great brand and increasing brand loyalty. An omni-channel is similar to a multi-channel strategy with the primary difference being that every ‘channel’ is interconnected and has an increased customer focus.
Omni-channel marketing considers the customer before the product, rather than multi-channel which often accounts for the product first and the customer second; omni-channel is about creating a seamless, interconnected customer journey from brand awareness to brand loyalty and advocacy.
Proactive Marketing vs Reactive Marketing
Another thing to consider when creating a successful brand that will impact sales performance is understanding that consumer purchasing habits have changed. This is not just in a post-covid world, although it acted as a catalyst, generally they have changed in the past 5, 10, 20, 30 years and so on as societal influences changed and developed. This will continue to be the case in the future too.
Consumers are becoming hyper aware of ethical, social and environmental considerations and how an organisation not only impacts, but responds to them — Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This is where proactive vs reactive marketing can play a critical role in the success, perception and even lifespan of an organisation.
In today’s modern world, people buy from people. They want to buy from an organisation whose mission and vision aligns with their own and are human, not just because they are accessible and convenient to them. People spend their money with organisations that are proactive in similar beliefs and are not reactive to a crisis regarding that belief. But are also fully transparent about it.
An example of this would be the delivery company DPD. They understand that they need to be ‘greener’ and that using fossil fuels for their delivery fleet doesn’t align with their green targets and what their customers are looking for. Therefore, they have been ‘proactive’ in introducing electric vehicles, supporting the circular economy etc. This is instead of ‘green-washing’, showcasing green aims and ambitions, but not taking the correlating actions to support them and then ‘reactive’ when scrutinised.
In contrast is how Hermes (Evri) reacted to a poor customer journey by ‘re-logoing’ rather than being ‘proactive’ to prevent the issue in the first place — a brand can make or break a company.