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The Visionary Brand | The UX | User Engagement Strategies
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EPISODE 161
CHRONICLE: July 10th, 2024
Content from Bryan’s new Award Winning, Bestselling Book
The Visionary Brand, The Success Formula Behind the World's Most Visionary Brands.
- Readers Favorite Award Winner, Best, Non-Fiction, Marketing Genre Business book
- Amazon Bestseller
The Visionary Brand | The UX | User Engagement Strategies
"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.” – Steve Jobs
THE UX | ENGAGEMENT
User engagement must happen early and frequently as you provide value to your current or potential customers. Of course, value can take several forms and functions. Most powerfully, it can be offered through personalization, which bonds the customer to your brand lifestyle as we saw in the previous podcasts. Everyone wants to feel wanted and understood, no matter what you sell. The closer you can match an experience to individual needs, the closer you come to building a relationship with the customer, eventually turning them into a brand advocate (part of the community) or ambassador (part of the brand).
Engaging with current customers within the Loyalty Loop and securing new consumers is a delicate balance for brands. Visionary brands use a clearly defined UX and engagement strategy to balance value with acquisition effectively. The value proposition can cross over to the acquisition side, but its approach is much different as it matches lifestyle enhancement versus price point compression.
Once a customer has joined the brand community, they will adapt to the brand’s product life cycles and choose either early adopter or late adopter product acquisition timing. A brand’s ability to know where their customers are on the adoption curve will tip the marketing investment scales relative to messaging, personalization, and social engagement, in addition to Lifetime Customer Value (LTV).
This is a fine art, and being able to read demographic profiles, engage with personalization, and consistently message lifestyle improvements through the adoption cycle will help you attain a loyal base of brand advocates. These advocates are the ones who allow you to control your brand’s destiny . . . but it wasn’t always so easy.
Before direct-to-consumer (DTC) channel opportunities, brands would only engage through one-way external communications such as; mailers, flyers, unsolicited e-mails, etc.—none of which allows for the kind of personalization that can be realized today. This world is much different now, where brands are in the driver’s seat. This is an essential shift in our culture, as brands want to control their engagement across all channels (ref. the Omni-Channel podcast). In maintaining their destiny, they can better define all aspects of the purchase loop, marketing, product cycles, engagement platforms, and direct communications.
Of course, you must know how to drive through this shift! Even as your brand is more equipped to secure its own future, there is also the need to understand the intricacies of building, developing, and growing brand awareness and equity. With time, this is relatively easy and inexpensive, though you will now find more tools to fine-tune your engine. The digital world we live in waits for no one, so either jump in and start driving or run the risk of getting run over.
Engage with your current customers, stay true to your brand foundation, and build trust and loyalty while advocating the virtues of your products. These current advocates are your company’s most valuable asset, and will assist with acquiring new members into your community. They can be measured, they can be engaged, they can be activated . . . or they can be ignored. Ensure you do not ignore—always engage, always provide value beyond product, and you will be rewarded with a mutually beneficial relationship.
“Take care of your customers and they will take care of you.”
THE UX | EMPATHIZE
Understanding and empathizing with your customers brings a personal touch to your creations. Empathy is understanding your consumers’ world, perceptions, and values and providing products or solutions that enhance their lifestyle, either through better products or processes.
This personal touch perspective reflects the simple sophistication principle we discussed earlier, bringing your vision of a better way to life—simplicity in the product design, The
sophistication in how it makes your world better. Visionary brands find this both challenging and enlightening, as it makes you leave your comfort zone and move into the reality of the solution you want. It drives ongoing passion for the product and how it will improve one’s life by saving time, improving relationships, or being more efficient or effective. Whatever the motive, creating this product is a labor of love for the brand team.
In defining what creates an attribute worthy of providing empathy for its end user, brands will ask:
Is this a solution looking for a problem, or a problem looking for a solution?
As simple as this question sounds, many brands have yet to ask it and ventured forward, blinded by their short-sightedness.
Finding solutions to everyday problems is an easier path to success, as it can be translated more effectively and realized quicker by end users. The beauty of finding a solution is found in its application in the real world, where the idea becomes reality. In creating solutions, there is a way to connect the community to the brand and eventually to a product ecosystem fully integrated with their daily life. This drive to join the ecosystem is driven by empathy, as the customer is looking for solutions that are not yet reality but are opportunities to simplify their life.
Throughout The Visionary Brand, we have discussed these vertical brand touchpoints. The more interconnected they become, the more diverse the ecosystem becomes to satisfy the needs of many while personalizing the experience for each. Empathy may seem intangible, but the more tangible a brand makes this connection, the more it finds how much its products have impacted individuals, families, and communities across its community.
Empathy is intuition about when something suits the brand and can genuinely impact a person’s life. When you give a person the ability to spend more time at home with the family or a loved one, this value becomes tangible. Visionary brands understand the impact of this tangible value, and ultimately, revenue growth follows. Visionary brands think beyond products; they value the solutions their products provide for their community.
Ultimately, building a visionary-quality UX is about putting together building blocks to form a complex structure for engaging and interacting with your consumers. From the idea through to purchase, you’re shooting for a seamless execution of a brand that knows the wants and needs of its customers better than they know themselves.
Understand your customers. Empathy for improving their lives will help you find solutions to give them what they currently do not have—more time, family, money, and life. Let this empathy fuel your brand’s interactions and product pipeline. This will make you visionary in your customers’ eyes and make your brand a valuable part of their everyday lives.
Stay True, Stay Authentic, be Different, and be Great!
Enjoy the Journey!
Bryan Smeltzer, President
LiquidMind Inc.
#TheVisionaryChroniclesPodcast
#TheVisionaryBrandBook
@LiquidMindsite.com
@BryanSmeltzer.com
© All rights reserved, Bryan Smeltzer, 2024
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BRYAN SMELTZER
Bryan Smeltzer is a consumer products business executive and entrepreneur. He has held executive-level roles in business development, Product, and marketing with some of the world's most prestigious brands, including Oakley, TaylorMade, Adidas, K-Swiss, and Schutt Sports, among other international brands. He also founded a men’s apparel brand, successfully running a profitable business for ten years, eventually selling to a VC firm.
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THE VISIONARY CHRONICLES
He also hosts a podcast called The Visionary Chronicles, ranked as the #1 Visionary and Top 50 Marketing Podcasts by Feedspot.
He recently finished his first bestselling book, The Visionary Brand, The Success Formula Behind the World’s Most Visionary Brands, and recently received the prestigious Readers Favorite Award for BEST Non-fiction, Marketing Genre book.
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Go to the link below, select Review, and send a screenshot to bryan@liquidmindsite.com.
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THE VISIONARY FILES
With the book's release, Bryan created The Visionary Brand MasterCourse. The Master Course site at The VisionaryFiles.com includes a Master Course with 18 Video Learning segments and almost 2 hours of Visionary lessons training. Over the past fourteen weeks, over 1,500 brand leaders and Entrepreneurs have taken the Master Course! Unleash your potential as a brand leader and take the Master Course.
Sign up for the Visionary Brand Course, and get a FREE hardcopy edition of The Visionary Brand and a “Be Visionary” coffee mug!
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LIQUIDMIND
Bryan oversees LiquidMind Inc., a global brand strategy firm that partners with start-ups and establishes mid to large-cap consumer brands to empower businesses to think differently, be different, drive a passionate culture, and execute relentlessly.
You can contact or follow him at;
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