Customer experience
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od ‘customer experience’! It is a huge honour for me to be guest editing this issue which features people I know and greatly respect for their contribution to the never-ending challenge we all face of making sense out of something so simply put in the seminal paper by Ronald Coase in 1937,1 when he described the purpose of business as ‘Fulfilling customer needs via relationships you maintain’. This simply constructed set of seven words say absolutely everything one needs to know about being successful in business and brand management. Before picking up on some excellent discussion points from our authors, I would like to revisit these words, especially the word ‘relationships’, and to consider how they remind us all of what our marketing task is, and how we deliver on that. One of the most frequently asked questions on my conference platforms is ‘how can we get the respect/budget for marketing in the boardroom?’.The answer is actually quite simple—understand the language of the boardroom. This is not the same as insider marketing-speak; something all functions have and need to operate. In financial terms, our marketing task is: ‘Raise and accelerate, prolong and minimise risk to cash flows’
This in turn will produce a rise in the company’s brand equity which, when added to the Net Asset Value of the business, gives the company its market valuation (simplified)—and the higher that is, the happier are its Board members and shareholders.
© 2007 PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD 1350-23IX $30.00 BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 15, NO. 2, 85–88 NOVEMBER 2007
www.palgrave-journals.com/bm
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EDITORIAL
Figure 1 Brand: The fundamental link between all aspects of experience
So, what has all this to do with customer experience? Well, cash flow effects are achieved through a complex set of relationships with customers, employees and partners. In fact, we could define Brand equity as ‘The value of the relationships that build and sustain cash flows’. Figure 1 details a schematic of how Brand Experience/Reputation is the bridge between the customer and the employee experience, and observed through this lens, it is hardly surprising that the world seems to be waking up, at last, to the importance of both the customer, and by absolute connection, the employee, experience. With that, I’d like to take a brief walk through the contributions in this special issue. The first contribution, by Professor Adrian Payne and Dr Pennie Frow, both based in Sydney, Australia, considers what a perfect customer experience might look like, and how it might be achieved at reasonable cost. Given that the prime reason why companies still appear to be failing to actually execute on all their good intentions is cost, Adrian and Pennie have considered the thinking around this 86
and give us a couple of very good case studies (TNT and Guinness) that help their points. Service quality is another key area that is often the source of either great satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and Dr Stan Maklan and Philipp Klaus of Cranfield School of Management share their own thinkin
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