Adverts are everywhere. Everyday we are bombarded by efforts to persuade us to buy this or use that. They raise our expectations by making promises about a product or service. When those promises aren’t kept, customers have a poor experience.
Recently we talked about how customers’ expectations are key to a good experience. Following similar thinking, we believe that when advertising raises customer expectations the customer experience must go beyond expectations in order to deliver a great customer experience.
Creative Good offer a brilliantly simple summary of the relationship between advertising and customer experience:
“Advertising is a promise of something.
Customer experience is the something.”
If companies are pouring money into advertising and raising their customer’s expectations, but they don’t match their investment in customer experience, it would follow that they risk investing in delivering a poor customer experience.
“If you were throwing a party, wouldn’t you clean up your house before you invited people over?”
Shouldn’t the people responsible for customer experience be driving the advertising? Only when they are confident the customer experience is consistently excellent should they start advertising. I suspect this is idealistic, but I wonder how much involvement or warning the departments contributing to customer experience have before an advertising campaign goes out.
What do you think? Is your advertising creating unfulfilled customer expectations? Are you spending too much on advertising and not enough on customer experience?
