Shopping. It’s arguably the most popular activity of the 21st century. There’s a well-known joke going around: that we don’t really buy things today because we need them — we do it to fill a myriad of other emotions. Bored at work? Open Amazon and shop. Stressed about something? Take an hour off and walk the mall. Just got paid? Shop. Read the news and panicked about the state of the world? Shop.
We are at the point where shopping goes way beyond what’s necessary. With the choices available today, it’s not hard to pick out something you like, will eventually use, and won’t feel guilty about.
This is where brands have stepped up. Optimal resources are spent on marketing and advertising every year to be seen and heard, so that when it comes to purchasing, they’re the top choice. Every brand has a target audience, a price point, and an industry position — they’re clear about where they stand and who their direct competition is.
Which leads to the question: which brands do we choose to buy from, and how do we make those decisions?
I remember a conversation my parents were having when I was younger. The privilege of coming from an upper-middle-class family meant we had a few options to consider when shopping, and being familiar with foreign brands made the choices even more varied. My father suggested, at one point, that since affordability wasn’t an issue, we should go with the best brand available. My mother’s answer was sharp common sense: while it was great that we could afford a higher-priced product with a good name, it was far more important to buy a locally based brand, because repair and upkeep would be so much easier. She had a point.
If it was locally made, the support infrastructure would be close at hand — you could drive to the authorized repair shop a few streets away and the wait would be short. The communication would be more direct too: you could just hound the poor repair guy until your work was done.
At the end of the day, no matter what we could afford, the only brands that held our trust were the ones we had faith in — the ones that would take care of the product’s lifeline even after it was sold. Since the foreign brands gave no indication they’d thought of this, our choice was easy.
This was twenty years ago.
Today, giants like Amazon and Flipkart have broken traditional shopping norms. The same place you used to buy your books from now also sells you pressure cookers and Alexa — the AI interface that can literally talk to you. Having such an all-encompassing platform raises the question: if we can buy from anywhere in the world, why can’t customer service be just as available, easy, and direct? We definitely have the tools for it — calls, chats, texts, FaceTime, and email make it easy to connect. All brands really need is to decide to invest in customer experience.
How, then, does a brand go about doing that?
Customer experience is the quality of the shopping journey a buyer has with your brand, regardless of whether they bought your product or not. The key question brands need to answer in a customer journey is: what are your customers coming to you for? While the quality of the product is a given, consumers place a far greater value on the quality of the interaction. Like my mother wanting to walk down to the repair center on her own terms — interaction, both emotional and functional, plays a bigger role in our lives than we give it credit for.
“Once brand trust has been established, it’s rare for people to change their minds.”
That’s why it pays to invest in creating an emotionally positive experience around acquiring the product, rather than treating it as just a commodity.
A good example is Apple — universally loved. They started with the flagship Macintosh and now make everything from TVs to phones to earphones. One of the key things that allowed this kind of expansion in such a short span is the experience they give customers during the buying journey, including after-purchase care. If you have a brand you love, one that takes the time to make each interaction customized and special, it has won your loyalty.
After that, as long as the quality of these interactions stays consistent (and Apple products have been known to have major issues along the way), you could sell that customer almost anything. It works because it saves them time, effort, and energy they’d otherwise spend searching elsewhere. They already have a brand they believe in, making the things they want to buy. Why look elsewhere?
Long-term trust matters for sustainability, because in today’s market, brands can go as fast as they come. By taking the time to understand customers’ habits and behaviors, and investing in a fabulous customer experience from start to end and beyond, brands secure their own future — and create a genuinely positive experience for people in the world.
And this is where the magic lies.