How Jakroo is Creating an Incredible Brand Experience

A couple of weeks ago we sat down with Michael Hernandez from Jakroo in our podcast The Active Lifestyle Marketer. You can listen to the episode on our BLOG or on iTunes. In our conversation with Michael, we talked about the importance of a great brand experience and great leadership. Today I’d like to expand on that conversation and share our thoughts on the two subjects. To start, let’s talk about the importance of a great customer experience.
As a creative agency, we preach the importance of consistency, cohesiveness, and perception in all brand touch points all of the time, to all of our clients. We believe that these things are incredibly important and powerful when you’re communicating to your audience. They are only effective though if they help create and support a great brand experience. Your company may have the most beautifully designed brand identity, or the most well thought out user experience online, but if your customer service sucks… all of that consistency and cohesiveness can quickly mean nothing. Your brand experience, or buyer’s journey, or whatever you want to call it, must be great from beginning to end.
Let’s imagine for a second your customer, the persona of your ideal client. They might’ve shown interest in your product or service recently. Maybe they’ve consumed some of your content or signed up for updates or newsletters. Shoot, maybe they saw a perfectly executed video on YouTube telling a story that speaks to them on an emotional level. Let’s say that customer finally decides to move forward with a purchase. Now, that client comes to your site and you’ve got a wonderfully executed user experience that makes the buying process simple and quick with no confusion. So far so good, right? Now, let’s say your client received your product and there is an issue or they have a simple question. So, they get on a call with customer service and customer service rep is rude. At that point do you think they’re going to care about the beauty or simplicity of your logo? Do you think they’re going to remember how easy your website was to use? I’m going to go out on a limb and say, absolutely not! All they will remember is the poor interaction they had with your team. This can happen at any point in the customer journey and or at any brand touch-point. There are millions of great companies around the world that have terrible brand identities, implementing awful visual storytelling, and some have no digital footprint at all, GASP! But, they are successful because they treat their clients well. They treat their clients like people, rather than numbers. In order to create successful active lifestyle brands, or any company for that matter, we must start with creating a great brand experience. In this digital age, it’s easy to fall into the temptation to treat your client as a number. Data is everything and drives everything, right? I’m in no way saying data isn’t important, but it can’t be all we focus on or people become numbers, and when people become numbers they will find other brands to support.

Great Brand Experiences Start with Great Leadership

This leads me into the second topic we touched on in our conversation with Michael, and that is great leadership. A great brand experience starts with great leadership. In order to create a great brand experience, one where you are treating your customer like a person and not a number, leadership must first establish this approach as a value within the fabric of the company. The larger the company, the more important this is for success. The larger the company, the more employees will be the first personal touch-point for your customer. I won’t touch on hiring in this article, but that’s where everything starts.
As Michael touched on in the podcast, Jakroo is seeing huge success because they have great leadership. Everyone within the company shares the same values and leadership communicates where the company is going and how they want to get there clearly. Jakroo may not have the cheapest offering in the active lifestyle industry, they may be selling a product of equal quality with their competition, but what sets them apart is their great customer experience at every touchpoint. They treat their customers like people and they have a unique focus on the individual (We touch on that approach in more detail in the podcast, and it’s really interesting what they’re doing). Invest in your customer’s brand experience. Treat your clients like people rather than numbers. Be consistent with that experience at every point that your customer touches your brand. Commit to this approach forever, and you will see success. We’re excited to see where Jakroo goes as they continue to create a great brand experience for their audience.

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