A Brand’s Love Story: How Customers Fall in Love with a Brand (2/5)
By Levina Kusumadjaja
Chapter 2: Consideration
If you haven’t read Chapter 1: Awareness, you should definitely read that article first and come back here because we’re going to continue our conversation about customer journey. Customer journey represents the journey that a customer goes through with a brand from the first encounter until total loyalty. It represents the relationship journey between a brand and a customer.
In the previous article, we discussed about how a brand needs to catch the customer’s attention first before the brand has a chance to be considered among other brands in their league. Now, the customers are moving to the second stage of their relationship, which is consideration.
Compared to the first stage (awareness), the amount of customers who move to this second stage will be less than those who were in the first stage, because not everyone will feel the brand captured their attention. If the brand failed to grab the customer’s attention, there won’t be brand awareness. Without awareness, customers cannot consider the brand.
It will be hard for you to think about what that person is like if you don’t even know they exist. It’s the same to a brand, after it catches your attention, you can now start thinking about the brand.
In a human relationship, this consideration is similar to dating. This is a time for two people to get to know one another better, to think about how good of a match they are for one another before taking their relationship to a deeper level. There is already something going on between the two, but it’s nothing too serious yet. Here we would normally ask questions like: Can I accept the person’s strengths and weaknesses? Do we have a good time when we’re together? Is there chemistry? And believe it or not, but customers also think about similar things when it comes to their relationship with a brand.
Let’s imagine a customer named Kelly for a moment. If she is looking for a new bed, she will be thinking about what she describes as the perfect bed. Perhaps it needs to be big enough for her to roll around, tall enough to put storage underneath, and neutral enough to fit her current bedroom vibe. This means that the brand that will pass this stage and move on to the next will be the one that offers her these qualities.
In consideration, Kelly will have at least a brand in mind. Most likely, there are several brands on her list. She will think about: Can this brand deliver the experience I want to get from a bed? She will go back to her perception about the brands and weight the pros and cons of buying from those brands. She compare several brands and decide which brand will match her best. The brand Kelly perceives offer the most value will win.
The goal is to get customers to believe that their perception about the brand is true, that they can trust the brand and pursue further commitment with the brand.
The challenge of a brand strategist in this stage is to figure out how the brand can communicate to customers in a way that the customers can see how well they match the brand and actually believe in it. The goal is to get customers to believe that their perception about the brand is true, that they can trust the brand. When customers perceive that the brand believes in what they believe and fulfill their specific needs, they will want to pursue further commitment with the brand.
Second stage complete. Next up - Chapter 3: Conversion.
Cheers!
Levina
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About the author:
Levina is a writer based in Indonesia. Because of Melinda Livsey, she recognized the power of brand strategy for every creative. She is sharing about her learnings as she goes to help creatives have fun in their growth and journey of building brands. Connect with her on LinkedIn and say hi!