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"On Purpose: Delivering a Branded Customer Experience People Love" strips branding advice of its complexity and brings it down to the real world of customer needs and wants. Using a three-principle method, "On Purpose" helps readers refine comprehensive and multi-channel approaches to maintaining a space in your customer's brain.
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For businesses, branding is more than a marketing catchphrase. It is survival. Brands that consistently promise and deliver good customer experiences survive in the always-on, super-connected global market of today. Modern consumers want more than a transaction from their favorite brands. They want these good customer experiences.
How can business leaders refine their businesses to create the perfect, multi-channel customer experience while keeping the bottom line intact? “On Purpose: Delivering a Branded Customer Experience People Love” is a book that helps businesses survive the era of dwindling customer trust and shifting loyalties.
What is the Book About
In present-day marketing, brands are expected to do a lot. They have to be engaging, authentic, relevant, and consistent across multiple channels. The problem lies in the advice given to reach those lofty goals. At best, businesses must cope with a dizzying number of ambiguous marketing jargon. At worst, they get bogged down with an arbitrary collection of marketing metrics which, in reality, bring them no closer to creating a great customer experience.
The authors of “On Purpose: Delivering a Branded Customer Experience People Love” believe this confusion stops business brands from reaching their potential. For a brand to live in your customer’s brain, it needs to express its message with crystal clarity. To reach that level of clarity, businesses don’t need more fancy terms. They need to return to the basics.
These basics, the authors argue, are expressed in three basic principles:
1. Stand up: Clarify your business’s values and purpose
2. Stand out: Express your values and purpose in a unique way
3. Stand firm: Develop the environment to nurture your brand
Focusing on these three principles in every single aspect of your business will help you take an integrated approach that serves your customer’s needs in a unique way. It’s a way that you may have been ignoring up until now. But continue to do this at your business’s peril. Customers are increasingly looking for brands that match their social and financial values. Businesses that can provide this unique connection have easy access to a spot in their consumers’ brains — and hearts. Making this connection with existing customers — and being able to make it with future customers — is crucial to maintaining an advantage in a crowded market.
“On Purpose: Delivering a Branded Customer Experience Peoople Love” is the work two veterans of the industry, Andy Milligan and Shaun Smith (@shaunsmith_cem).
Milligan is a brand consultant, author, speaker, and founding partner of the Caffeine Partnership, a branding strategy consulting agency.
Smith is a brand consultant, author, and founder of Smith +Co, a customer experience consulting agency.
What Was Best About This Book
The best part of “On Purpose” is its focus on simplicity. The book identifies a key problem in customer acquisition and retention. Many businesses know how to get a customer’s attention, but they don’t have the environment to sustain that attention. “On Purpose” provides a reflective, comprehensive look at this problem that challenges the expensive software and trendy terms thrown around today.
What Could Have Been Done Differently
“On Purpose” provides a simple framework for understanding the complexities of branding in a comprehensive way. (This is most evident in the “Eight Practice” shared in Chapter 10). Unfortunately, it still leaves out a lot of basic information a small business leader would need to put such a framework in place for his or her brand. It provides a lot of food of thought, but not enough strategies to help a business out this powerful branding to work.
Why Read This Book
The goal of “On Purpose” is to inspire managers and entrepreneurs to create and maintain purpose in every part of their businesses. Milligan and Smith have succeeded in creating a book with valuable insight into how a company’s sense of purpose allows it to stand out to customers in a marketplace of almost limitless choices.
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David
Charles,
In your review on what could have been done differently, see below, where could I find the missing resources you mention?
What Could Have Been Done Differently
“On Purpose” provides a simple framework for understanding the complexities of branding in a comprehensive way. (This is most evident in the “Eight Practice” shared in Chapter 10). Unfortunately, it still leaves out a lot of basic information a small business leader would need to put such a framework in place for his or her brand. It provides a lot of food of thought, but not enough strategies to help a business out this powerful branding to work.
You may like to know that there is a comprehensive online toolkit on our website (below) that is available free to support the book. This provides all the tools and tactics most businesses might need to be ‘On Purpose’.
Shaun Smith