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10: Taking Action: Transform Your Products and Brands to Captivate Customers

While customers may seek functional values from the products they purchase, it is ultimately the emotional rewards they draw that determine their decision to engage with a specific brand or provider, and their emotional reaction that keeps them loyal or leaves them feeling unfulfilled. Fail to recognize this, and you will leave the future of your business to luck and happenstance, hoping that things work out on their own. Beyond merely recognizing and exploring emotions, you must develop a vision to create products that fulfill the emotional needs and desires of customers.

The author uses the hackneyed metaphor of getting into cold water - some prefer to leap in at once and others to wade slowly in - and there are benefits to one approach versus another.

Taking The Plunge

Taking the plunge beings with assessing all your brands and models at one fell swoop - the emotions they confer, those that they ought to, and those that competitors are addressing. The customers' perspective is critical to making a valid analysis.

Analyzing multiple products at once takes considerable effort but has the advantage of being able to identifying gaps or redundancies in your product line and finding opportunities for new ones. It may also indicate conflicts among brands and the need to separate products into different brands (or create an independent brand rather than marketing a product under the parent brand).

The basis for your product emotion strategy is matching your products to the expectations of the market. It would be unwise to emerge from such an effort with plans only to change the marketing messages to adapt expectations to the products as they currently are - though it may be a valid conclusion to keep the product as it is but pursue a different market.

Mapping your results against those of competing markets may likewise identify areas in which you are in a crowded market segment and can pursue more open territories, or better focus to win more customers in well-contended areas you do not wish to leave.

Wading in Slowly

An alternative approach is to take a slower approach, taking one product at a time through the paces. It may be a much larger proposition for a firm with one product or brand, but for firms that have multiple brands and product lines, it may be more feasible.

The trade-off for taking a more incremental approach is that, if your entire brand must be adjusted, certain products will seem out of place until a sufficient number of others have also followed. It also provides a long, slow signal to competitors who might pick up on your idea and beat you to market with more of their product line. And it's entirely possible that being slow and conservative in your approach means your results will also be slow to materialize.

A slow approach can also be advantageous in that your first few efforts will give you experience to improve later efforts - rather than making big mistakes all at once with no opportunity to learn and adjust your strategy.

Tradeoffs

Some of the tradeoffs already mentioned are discussed here - and assessing the speed at which you move may depend on the particular characteristics of your market, your competition, and your own internal culture.

Whatever approach you take, the ultimate goal is to better engage and captivate customers by addressing their emotional needs, which can be a more significant and easier sustained competitive advantage than competing on price or features. (EN: More cheerleading follows to the end.)