Hi, welcome to this course on customer experience in brand. As the name implies, we're going to look at the intersection of brand and how it cascades into customer experience activities. But just as importantly how brand doesn't influence and integrate into customer experience activities. CX and brand typically involve business activities that are owned and driven by different departments. There is many interdependencies between brand and customer experience as there are dependencies between any two business functions you can think of. The problem is that brand and customer experience profiles often have very narrow interpretations of their roles and this limits the potential synergies that they might share. Whether you're currently in the branding side of marketing activities or you're more in a customer experience side, this course is designed to reveal to you the importance of the other's activities and the importance of taking more expansive view of customer experience and it's relation to brand. If you are already an organization which has a holistic and coordinated approach to branding and customer experience, lucky for you. Still, this course will also help you provide by providing some new ways of thinking about your role, processes, and activities. To make an impact, customer experience and brand require coordination among many departmental silos. Often these departments have competing and conflicting incentives. So, let's not kid ourselves. All transversal work is hard and that's why in this course I'm not going to pretend that customer experience and brand alignment is just a matter of a few off-sites and team-building exercises. I'm going to inject my sometimes cynical perspective of the messy real-world nature of transversal initiatives and the challenges they present. Along the way, however, we're going to explore tactics for getting this operational alignment. I promised by the end of this course, you'll have a better understanding of, number, one the reasons why customer experience and brand shouldn't be aligned. Second, the many reasons why they're not, and then third, a good number of tools and techniques for getting alignment without having to be the CEO of the company. One important ground rule. We're going to rely on realistic scenarios taking either from real or hypothetical companies that force you to explore the issues more deeply. I promise not to hold up that Coca Cola and the Googles and the Apples of the world as references. Well, they likely have many things to teach us to with regards to branding and customer experience. The marketing blog has fear of grad school courses, learning materials on the web. There is awash with many examples from companies like those that are again insanely rich or have super-advanced branding or customer experience efforts. It's just too easy and it's too hard to learn from them. So, again, it's much more interesting to learn from situations where real life struggles appear, then learn from powerful companies who seemed to do everything right. So, I'm really looking forward to guiding you through these next few weeks and I think this is going to be a fantastic course and we're going to learn no matter what your background is.
