brand contact touchpoints

A brand touchpoint is any way a person in the marketplace interacts with your brand - so practically every brand has hundreds of touchpoints and each plays a role in shaping brand perception. So we must consider brand touchpoint design and management critical to building a strong, valuable brand.

Great brands may think big, but they sweat the small stuff. They know that all the little things they do or fail to do in person shape brand perceptions far more than the big things they claim through mass media. So they design their customer experiences down to last detail, and usually appeal to as many of the five human senses as possible, since they know those experiences are so much more impactful, distinctive, and memorable than any advertising or marketing program they could run.

I named this blog CX Journey™ for a reason - to convey that the the customer experience is just that, a journey.

What does that mean? It means that, while it's important to look at the individual touchpoints, moments of truth, interactions, channels, etc., it's more important to remember the whole journey, the entire experience that the customer has with your brand or organization as he's trying to do whatever job it is he's trying to do.

This post was originally published as a guest post on Jim Tincher's Heart of the Customer blog. I have updated it for this repost. As we close out the summer of 2012 travel season, I thought this was a fitting time to share this whimsical post on planning your Customer Experience Journey.