How to design your data collection strategy?
This playbook outlines a comprehensive framework for understanding and improving the customer journey, utilizing a series of sprints and questions to guide the process. It begins by emphasizing building empathy through exploring the business ambition, customer needs, and cultural narrative. The process then moves into defining the desired future customer experience by analyzing the current experience, identifying Jobs to be Done, and formulating a Design Statement. Ultimately, the goal is to identify opportunities for value creation and develop a strategy that aligns with brand goals and customer expectations across different stages of the journey.
This briefing document synthesizes key concepts and themes from the provided excerpts of "Brand strategy Aditi Garg (1).pdf" and "Customer Journey playbook .pdf". It focuses on the importance of brand development for D2C businesses and outlines a structured approach to understanding the customer journey to inform strategy and execution.
Source 1: "Brand strategy Aditi Garg (1).pdf" (Brand Development Playbook for D2C Brands)
This source emphasizes the critical nature of brand development for businesses aiming to build a consistent and recognizable offering, moving beyond a simple "cost plus basis" business model.
Main Themes and Key Ideas:
Defining "Brand": A brand is more than just a product or service; it's about creating a specific and consistent perception in the consumer's mind. This is highlighted in the FAQ section: "A brand is when you want someone to consistently think of your offering in a particular way."
Brand Development as a Strategic Process: Developing a brand involves defining vision, values, and mission, ensuring consistent quality, and creating recognizable elements like taglines. This requires a strategic approach including expert involvement, data analysis (behavioral and attitudinal), workshops, and competitor analysis.
When to Invest in Brand Development: The playbook suggests undertaking brand development post the "proof of concept stage," after some initial sales have provided data points on customer experience. It becomes particularly important when increasing sales channels and wanting consistent brand recognition across these channels.
The Brand Development Process (Snapshot): The playbook outlines a multi-step process:
Planning: Consumer needs assessment and market intelligence.
Execution Planning Strategy: Data collection and collation.
Brand Strategy/Identity: Positioning routes, value proposition, frameworks, visual elements, mood board, tagline, and target consumer personas.
Communication, Messaging, Brand Logo.
Execution (Business Strategy).
Step 1: Planning - Understanding the Consumer: A core element of planning is a comprehensive understanding of the target consumer. This involves detailing who they are (psychographics and demographics), their different user groups, key needs and desired attributes, current consideration sets, product usage, budget, purchase triggers and frequency, engagement with existing brands, and where they get recommendations and purchase from.
Framework for Data Collation across the Customer Journey (Search, Purchase, Use, Engage/After Sales Service): The playbook provides a framework for collecting data at each stage of the customer journey to gain insights. Examples of data points include:
Search: Role of influencers, existing play across touchpoints, user recommendations ("10% of users refer to friends/family for recommendation on brands"), print media influence on deals.
Purchase: Consumer purchase patterns (frequency, points of purchase), dealer dynamics, role of discounts and bundling.
Use: Level of interaction and involvement, key influencers, existing communities.
Engage/After Sales Service: Data on returns/exchanges/refunds, on-site/off-site service.
Identifying "Moments of Truth" and Pain Points: The framework emphasizes highlighting "WOW moments/Moments of Truth/Pain moments" within the customer journey to understand the intended and actual experience.
Market Intelligence: Similar to consumer needs assessment, the playbook outlines a framework for collecting market intelligence across the customer journey stages to understand competitor activities and market dynamics.
Step 2: Developing the Strategy: This step involves identifying different customer segments, focusing on 1-2 key consumer personas for strategy development, and defining the brand purpose based on target consumer, offering, and unique attributes: "For ………….(define your target consumer) we offer……………..because we have ……………………….. This is where we start talking brand from product …"
Step 3: Positioning Route: This involves identifying unique need states to target, defining the brand archetype to set the communication tone and elements, and building a storytelling narrative articulating the brand purpose, "The What" (offering), and "The How" (expertise, USP, processes).
Step 4: Execution (Business Strategy): This step focuses on aligning the brand strategy with business feasibility and overall business goals.
Notable Quotes:
"A brand development exercise is a critical phase for a company. Its when you decide on some attributes for your brand and want the brand to stand for them."
"A brand is when you want someone to consistently think of your offering in a particular way."
"Do it post the proof of concept stage, after some sales so you have an idea of whats working, what’s not."
"First step is to build a comprehensive understanding of Your (Product) User under the following heads"
"For ………….(define your target consumer) we offer……………..because we have ……………………….. This is where we start talking brand from product …"
Source 2: "Customer Journey playbook .pdf"
This source presents a "5 sprints 20 questions" framework for understanding and optimizing the customer journey, emphasizing building empathy with the consumer.
The OUTPUT STAGE OF DATA COLLECION LADDER
Main Themes and Key Ideas:
Customer Journey Focus: The central theme is understanding and improving the customer journey as a core element of business strategy.
"5 Sprints 20 Questions" Framework: The playbook proposes a structured approach with 20 key questions grouped into stages like "Empathise," "Define," "Create," "Build," and "Learn."
Empathy as the Starting Point: The initial stage, "Empathise," focuses on gaining a deep understanding of the consumer, the market, and the cultural context. Key questions in this stage include:
What is the business ambition?
What do people need?
What is cultural narrative?
Where can we create value?
Understanding People's Needs: This involves profiling the target audience, understanding their behaviors, what they are seeing and hearing (word of mouth, conversation), and identifying their points of pain and gain. The example of "Back to School" highlights delving into audience profiling, relevant behaviors, and the impact of external factors like the pandemic.
Cultural Narrative: Understanding the cultural context surrounding the product or service is crucial. The "Back to School" example explores how events like COVID have changed perceptions of school and the value placed on familiarity and appreciation.
Identifying Value Creation Opportunities: This stage connects business ambition, brand purpose, people's needs, and the cultural narrative to identify areas where value can be created for the consumer. This is depicted through the "Value Exchange" framework, linking functional and emotional needs with brand elements. The Special K example illustrates how understanding the target audience's needs and the cultural shift towards "fuel for achievement" informs where to create value (educate on health and exercise, provide utility).
Defining the Jobs to be Done (JTBD): This involves understanding the current consumer experience, defining the desired future state, identifying the insights needed to bridge the gap, and articulating the "Jobs to be Done" – the type of experience required to meet consumer needs at different stages of the journey.
Mapping the Customer Journey: The playbook emphasizes mapping the client's customer journey to a framework, which can be done through various data sources (Nielsen, Mintel, social listening, shopper studies, depth interviews).
Sources and Signals for Journey Analysis: A range of data sources are listed for analyzing the customer journey across stages like Passive, Triggers, Consideration, Purchasing, Using, Advocacy, and Repurchasing.
Defining the Future State: This involves moving from understanding the current experience to envisioning the ideal future experience for the consumer and identifying the insights required to achieve it.
Connecting JTBD to the Overall Strategy: The "Define" blueprint links the current experience, future state, insights, and Jobs to be Done to inform the overall strategy.
Design Statement: This provides a concise articulation of the desired future experience for the target audience, as exemplified by the Vodafone example: "To help Pop Culturalists to lead a Tech VIP Life."
Notable Quotes:
"We build empathy"
"What do people need?"
"What is cultural narrative?"
"Trying to identify where get to create the most value"
"Defining the jobs to be done"
"Mapping clients consumer journey to our framework"
Overall Synthesis:
Both sources highlight the strategic importance of understanding the customer and their journey. The "Brand strategy Aditi Garg (1).pdf" provides a framework for building a strong brand identity rooted in consumer understanding and market analysis, emphasizing consistency and recognition. The "Customer Journey playbook .pdf" offers a structured process for gaining deep empathy with the consumer, identifying opportunities for value creation, and defining the "Jobs to be Done" to inform the design of future experiences. Together, these playbooks suggest a holistic approach where brand development and customer journey mapping are intertwined to build successful and customer-centric D2C businesses. Effective brand development relies on understanding the customer journey, and optimizing the customer journey is a key way to build and reinforce a brand. Both emphasize data-driven insights and a structured, step-by-step process.
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