Late last summer a reckless driver sideswiped my beloved Jeep Renegade as it sat empty, parked on the street in front of my house. It was totaled along with another parked car. Miraculously, the driver totaled their car too! Yes, three cars totaled, but somehow that driver managed to walk away - shaken, but uninjured. It took a few weeks to settle the insurance claim, a very bad customer experience, but I did decide on a new used car that I found on Carmax.com. About fifteen years ago I'd purchased a car from them online and remembered the great experience of buying a used Saturn vehicle online and having it delivered to me along with the paperwork which I signed sitting at my dining room table.
This time I ordered the car for a test drive online and had it delivered to the dealership in Winchester. That new showroom was only a year old, and I was impressed by the in-person customer experience. The staff was friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful, but the branding and brand messaging elevated the experience way above an ordinary car dealership transaction. Especially when you consider that I was buying one of their used cars. Their slogans, "Enjoy the Ride" was displayed on a large screen by the checkout counter and again as dimensional text above the doors leading out to the covered bay where another giant screen prominently displayed the message, "Love Every Mile" in the brands signature sunshine yellow and dark blue. I couldn't help but smile when I was handed the keys to my new Fiat 500X with an enormous yellow bow on the hood. Then they asked if I wanted to take a picture with my new car, and as reticent as I would normally have been, I wanted the full experience, because it was a great branded experience. As they say in the business it was "on brand".
There are a lot of moving parts to a great brand experience, and when it delivers on the brand promise we want to share that with our friends and families and even strangers. Great messaging gets to the heart of a brand and I encourage the companies I work with to spend their time on getting this detail right.
Kommentare