Putting the pieces together
Editor's note: Paul Miser is CEO of growth strategy agency Chinatown Bureau.
At the time when Lincoln Motor Company approached us with a challenge, I had no idea the scale of disruption and transformation many industries were about to face. It was a time in business history where technology hit a point of adoption and efficacy to truly change behaviors and, ultimately, the way business was done.
At first glance, Lincoln’s challenge seemed simple from an advertising point of view, “We need a new way to grow. Our industry is moving from manufacturing to mobility. Our business model is moving from ownership to membership. We need to prepare our brand and business for this evolution so we can capitalize on these trends.” But as we dug deeper in uncovering the truth behind the request, we realized it was not exactly a small task but something that could determine the fate of not only an entire company but could set the stage for an entire industry, an entire movement.
If I knew one thing at the time, the answer to this challenge was not going to be as simple as an ad campaign. I knew that, if done correctly, it would require an end-to-end transformation of Lincoln’s entire business, from vehicle decisions to service offerings to how it made money. In essence, it had to become an experience brand. With the challenge set, we embarked on a paradigm-shifting journey.
The journey started with understanding where Lincoln was as a brand and what its value proposition, purpose and vision were. At the time Lincoln had just gone through an entire brand-strategy refresh, so these refined elements were a great starting point to build from. Its brand and product point of view was all about delivering effortlessness to its customers. This brand strategy took on many forms, from how the products and features were designed to how the dealer experience was created, all the way through to the advertising and website experience. However, each touchpoint was geared toward communicating this value proposition only from a purchase and ownership perspective – not the entire consumer journey and not to answer the challenge request. Throughout our discovery we found that this brand strategy provided a solid foundation to translate the necessary elements of an experience brand strategy. It gave us a filter to discern insights and opportunities for the customer and the brand experience.
Next, we wanted to intimately understand the issues and opportunities surrounding the trend elements outlined in its challenge, including manufacturing to mobility and ownership to membership. To establish a broad view of the situation we explored various elements in, around and adjacent to the brand and industry, as well as more tertiary trends happening in other, non-related industries. We looked at current owner and automotive driver sentiment. We tracked and modeled out customer behaviors as they relate to vehicle ownership and usage. We mapped the end-to-end mobility landscape from direct competitors, upcoming startups and transportation alternatives. We explored technology trends in, around and outside of the automotive and mobility industries to see what technologies and behaviors will and should be available to tap into.
With this exploration and discovery, we started to get a sense of macro trends that Lincoln, as a brand, could authentically start to connect and capture. This exploration gave us both the spatial understanding of what was happening in and around the brand as well as an element of time to ensure we were solving the right challenges at the right moment to ensure product-market fit.
To create the full experience brand strategy, we established a vision and the strategic tenets of how the Lincoln brand of effortlessness came to life in the future state of the trends we uncovered in discovery. This vision provided the blueprint for where the brand needed to go and the strategic tenets delivered the decision-making criteria to execute in order to reach that vision. Each element was designed to illustrate how the Lincoln brand would capitalize on the appropriate opportunity trends and how the consumer relationship would come to life at key moments, creating the symbiotic value exchange between the brand and the consumer.
Next, we built a series of personas that we could connect the experience brand strategy with, offering the right value at the right time. These personas were a spectrum of use cases from ownership to membership, from driving to riding and everything in between. These use cases gave us the insight and information to build holistic customer experience journeys to find the pain points, moments of joy and opportunities for the Lincoln brand to show up authentically and provide new or increased value to the customers.
These customer journeys were built in a progressive manner, showing the transformation from the current state of the brand-consumer relationship and then were modeled out in two-year increments over the course of 10 years. These customer journeys captured the gaps from stage to stage in persona growth, technology advancements, mobility trends and product and service development, to showcase what needs to happen in order to bring the Lincoln experience-brand strategy to life.
This progressive consumer journey mapping created the strategic roadmap to define all the things that had to be true in order to execute against the Lincoln experience-brand strategy at the right stage. In the end it created a list or backlog of projects that had to be completed at key milestones to move the consumer relationship and the brand forward.
By being able to document these projects on a timeline, we could prioritize the projects in a master strategic roadmap to deliver the experience brand correctly, over time, learning and optimizing along the way. The outcome of this exercise became the “Lincoln Way,” an approach to the experience and lifestyle a consumer receives from being in a relationship with the Lincoln brand. Some of the tactical executions that were derived from this work were:
The Lincoln app: The app that connected the consumer and their preferences to the lifestyle of Lincoln, connecting them to the vehicle by being able to control key features like start/stop, climate control, location, etc.; connecting them to their local dealer through service and maintenance updates from the vehicle and the dealer; connecting them to support and lifestyle through on-touch interaction with their personal concierge.
Mobility offerings: To lean toward the effortlessness in driving, we partnered with and built mobility offerings that made getting from Point A to Point B more seamless. These offerings included finding parking from the app, location-based gas refueling and car-sharing when traveling.
Service offerings: We enabled a single point of contact through the Lincoln Concierge that went along with the owners everywhere they went from website to app to dealership, creating a singular relationship with each owner. We built dealer programs that took away pain points from service and maintenance including pickup and delivery for service, where the dealer would come and pick up the vehicle, leave an equivalent or better loaner and then deliver the vehicle once the service was complete, reducing the pain of going into the dealership.
Built a foundation
All of these offerings and more built a foundation for Lincoln in the mobility and membership space. By taking the consumer experience away from just the financial transaction moments like purchase, service and financing, Lincoln has been able to become more to its members and owners than ever before.
This robust example from Lincoln illustrates the steps needed to define and become an experience brand, from research to strategic development to customer journeys, into tactical execution of a strategic roadmap. Going through the steps for your brand is crucial to get a deeper sense of what the world looks like in and around your brand and your consumer. This insight gives you massive power to not only define your future and your potential but also the understanding of what you can do today to move your brand forward.
As outlined, experience brands are continuously evolving and growing based on consumer behavior and market opportunities, never a moment in the future. And, like the Lincoln example shows above, you can start right where you are by understanding your brand strategy and what it means to your consumers today. With your brand strategy ready, let’s break down the steps to define your experience brand strategy.
Market intelligence. As in the Lincoln example, we gained as much intelligence as we could while we were establishing the experience brand strategy. Not only did we want to look at information in a moment in time but we also wanted to create the framework and approach to track and reflect over time. By establishing an ongoing market research approach, we were able to understand the trends, behaviors and opportunities that we could leverage to establish the experience brand strategy. To best understand the complexity of the opportunities for your brand, you will want to gain intelligence in, around and outside of your industry and your consumer set. With today’s connected consumer, behaviors and expectations in a particular industry are affected by second- and third-level interactions, meaning that the experiences they have in one industry directly affect their expectations of another.
Direct insight. Looking at your current audience, competitors and industry as well as your organization can give you the information needed to understand the current opportunities for growth. Looking at consumer behavior trends, competitive action and technology trends will allow you to develop the insights needed to optimize your current offerings and find new avenues to create new value within the current environment.
Adjacent intelligence. The end benefit or value proposition your consumers receive may not be satisfied by your direct industry. They may be getting value from other industries around yours. For example, consumers don’t have to own a car to get from one place to another. The rise of ride-hailing and car-sharing offers an opportunity for consumers to get the end benefit of transportation across different industries. The intelligence you can gather from dissecting your end-consumer benefit across other industries will give you more context to consumer behaviors and technology trends, letting you build and create new value propositions for your consumer.
Tertiary exploration. Tracking and defining more macro trends and consumer behaviors across non-direct industries can give you insight into how consumers are behaving and how technology is affecting their experiences. The experiences consumers are getting elsewhere have a direct effect on what they expect from the experiences they receive from you. If buying a mattress is now as simple as a single click, imagine what that can do to the expectations of renting an apartment or buying a car. This macro-view exploration will give you new insight into the trends and behaviors that will ultimately become expectation in your industry.
Ongoing tracking. Gaining market intelligence allows you to develop stronger decisions today. However, tracking this intelligence over time allows you to see emerging trends, consumer expectations, opportunities in the marketplace and understand how value is created for your consumers. This ongoing insight will help you move beyond the expectations of your current industry and the status quo growth and begin to chart your own course in creating new value over time.
Truly bring them to life
The strategic development for an experience brand takes your current brand purpose, promise, goals and objectives and expands them into the elements that truly bring them to life across the consumer journey. Using these elements as input for your experience brand strategy, you can begin to see how your brand could and should interact, how it converses with consumers, how relationships should be built over time, establishing trust, expectation and understanding. This level of experience strategy development gives you the clarity to define, develop and orchestrate the symbiotic value exchange needed to add massive value to your consumers while finding new revenue and increased efficiencies.