Beyond brand theory: managing with touchpoints

Where does the brand have an impact? There’s a lot of management theory and internal managerial practice entailed in the brand, but to make the brand stick and work for the business goals, it needs to be operationalized and have an impact on the audience.

The points where theory and practice are operationalized are known as touchpoints. Touchpoints are where the consumer or audience interacts with the brand. This should mainly be the external audience of consumers, but it may also be employees, the audience for the internal brand.

For the purposes of this column, I will use a notional, tangible product, possibly in a consumer goods category, and leave the heavy lifting to your imagination.

Not all touchpoints are created equal. Some have a greater impact, others a lesser effect. The larger the scale of the enterprise and the greater the margin to the brand, the easier it will be to assign budget to the activity of managing them. Some will be obvious, for instance visible soft drink freezers in stores. Others may be less obvious, such as the quality of the bulk packaging in which the soft drinks are delivered to the store, which can affect the retailer’s willingness to stock the goods.

The trick will be to decide which touchpoints should be central focuses, and which should be kept in consideration and observed but do not justify a central focus and high budget. The best recommendation I can give is that if no touchpoints are immediately apparent, engage a research company for an audit and prioritize on the basis of valid findings.

Touchpoints come into play at three points in the consumer journey: before the purchase, at the time of the purchase and post-purchase.

Most of the work will be during the pre-purchase phase. This phase involves a lot of content and story development. Following the story brand methodology (The SB7 narrative elements) is a useful way to codify the development activities. At this point, you will want to create a compelling demonstration of and argument for consumer transformation. Among other things, you should focus on owned media such as your website and email, and paid media, such as your social media channels.

The purchase phase focuses on the so-called intrinsics, the nature and positive experience of the product. The consumer needs to evaluate the product at the point of purchase, so the product must conform to the promise of the pre-purchase phase. This phase also entails development of the brand for retailers and partners.

The third phase is the post-purchase phase, which takes a longer-term view, aiming to reinforce satisfaction and retain the customer for repeat purchases. Tools in this phase will include customer service, surveys such as the net promoter score as well as customer education to deal with complaints.

Interesting to note is that the third phase loops back to the first phase. By the post-purchase phase, the customer should be experiencing the transformation promised in the first phase. The customer experience observed in the post-purchase phase should inform evolution of the brand and the first phase messages.

As you can tell, touchpoints must be managed carefully and conscientiously with current sales and marketing in the immediate view, as well as with a view to longer range retention and repeat sales on the horizon. Without effective touchpoint management, spend on the brand is wasted.