Hi, welcome back. So today, we're going to talk about what I identify as branding orphans. I'll explain this term a little bit later. But just up to now, we've used brand activities to see how they cascaded into the various customer experience touch points. We've talked about how brand is typically strongly represented prior to the purchase phase of the customer journey and less than the other phases. We talked about brand guidelines and how they should be applied to a lot of the other touch points, but perhaps aren't. Today, we're going to go through a number of different touch points within scenarios for different types of companies, and products, and services. Then assess how well they reflect the brand mission and values. So, with all the great customer journey research you've done, and now that you have all the touch points visible in one place, which you'd want to do now is look out for the brand orphans. So what is a brand orphan? Simple. They are touch points without alignment in explicit guidance that is defined into brand messaging. They are the touch points managed by teams who have little or no idea what the company's brand is all about. At best, they're almost passive conversations. At worst, they water down or even confused the brand. So you want to address them, but how do you attack these orphans? How do you solve this problem? First, make sure the teams managing these conversations recognized the gaps. The idea is that you create a checklist with the components of the brand, the values that promised to tone, the brand guidelines. Then, you work with a team responsible for each touch point, go through each item in the checklist to assess whether the touch point reinforces those items. In here, we're not trying to do a detailed assessment of every touch point in adherence to the brand's message, we're simply trying to identify the touch points that are most disconnected. So let's use a concrete example. A typical touch point, one often overlooked is packaging. For e-commerce sites, putting the product in a box in order to shift to the customer simply viewed as a process to make more efficient. Find an appropriately sized box, put in some bubble wrap to protect a product. Slab and address sticker on the box. Done. Such an approach is hardly connected with your brand. When the shipment arrives and the customer's first experience is unboxing the product, such a generic packaging solution is a lost opportunity in a conversation. The conversation or their lack of conversation is disconnected from your company's brand. This is a good example of a branding orphan. Your company may have many such brand orphans. Each one of them might with small investments be improved in ways that reinforce the brand rather than enabling it to remain a non-specific activity. Doing this activity across different touch points will quickly identify and prioritize some touch points that you need to improve. In many cases, these touch points can achieve brand alignment with simple fixes. So, in the packaging example I just spoke about, a fix might be simply to introduce a personalized thank you note as part of the packaging or perhaps using branded packaging tape with your company's logo on it to seal the box. Just get the touch point connected to the brand. So another example, one common touch point that might be identified as a brand orphan, our physical touch points, receptionist desk, the counter for product returns in your store, that cash register, the waiting room for visiting customers or patients. In our rush to digitize customer touch points, we often neglect the impact that our employees have even in the shortest interactions on the customers' perceptions of the brand. Working with their colleagues involved in such physical touch points can help reveal quite quickly how disconnected they are from the brand messages. It's important not to use his brand orphans' checklist exercise as a means to punish the such employees. Improving doesn't require deep training. Oftentimes, it's just a simple communication, a bit of role-playing, pointing out to other employees are doing it well. Identifying these orphans can help you make with some small investments a big return in terms of brand perception. So does your company have brand strategy orphans? Probably. This simple exercise enables you to identify the most unaligned customer touch points that may be having a negative impact on your customer experience. Thank you. We'll see you next time.
