Customer experience touchpoints create most brand equity – report

Only 28% of brand equity is being built by paid media. Direct and indirect customer experience touchpoints can deliver the rest. 

This is the assertion made by a new report titled ‘Be Distinctive Everywhere. The Experience Edition’ launched in Cannes by branding agency JKR and insights company Kantar. 

Their findings suggest many businesses may need to reconsider how they allocate marketing budgets. 

With experience touchpoints accounting for most of the brand equity being built, and large language models (advanced artificial intelligence systems designed to understand, process and generate human language) increasingly forming their understanding of brands through those same touchpoints, the stakes for getting customer experience right have never been higher, the report suggests. 

“Knowing which touchpoints drive equity is only half the equation. The other half is building the creative and strategic infrastructure to act on it consistently,” comments Lee Rolston, Global Chief Growth Officer at JKR. 

In response, JKR has put forward its Distinctive Experience Cycle, a three-part framework designed to help brands deliver growth across the entire brand experience: 

• Distinctive Position: Basing the brand on a belief that is true to its DNA and shared by its audience. 

• Distinctive Expression: Developing a distinctive brand expression that motivates people to participate through a shared belief. 

• Distinctive Experience: Delivering experiences that consistently reinforce that belief with the audience. 

Customer experience is linked to market share growth 

Meanwhile, Kantar’s research indicates that brands which improve and amplify their customer experience are 2.5 times more likely to achieve significant market share growth. The report also concludes that the combination of distinctive branding and customer experience contributes more to brand differentiation than communications or any other factor measured. 

“For too long, experience has been the underfunded, undermeasured side of brand building. We have clear evidence of not just how much experience contributes to brand equity, but which touchpoints carry the greatest weight,” says Mark Chamberlain, Global Managing Director for Customer Experience at Kantar. 

“That gives marketers something they have never had before: the intelligence to make confident, data-backed decisions about where to invest in experience to drive meaningful brand growth. That’s fundamental when trying to influence both people’s and agents’ interactions with brands.” 

Be Distinctive Everywhere. The Experience Edition.is available here.