S08.EP15 — Customer Experience Psychology: How to Build a Memorable Brand with Si Elliott

JUST Branding

In this episode, hosts Jacob Cass and Matt Davies interview customer experience expert Si Elliott about applying behavioral science to brand

Key takeaways

• Si Elliott outlines eight CX principles: considering detail, managing expectations, personalization, providing control, minimizing effort, identity/emotion, building relationships, and engaging all senses.
• Customer experience is defined as the perception of feelings resulting from interactions with a brand, existing entirely in the mind of the customer.

Main topics

• Principles of Customer Experience
• Behavioral Science in Marketing

Notable quotes

Customer experience is just the perception of feelings that people have with the interactions or the experience they have with you.

Conclusion

Successful branding requires shifting focus from what a company delive

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) So if you want to get a Rolex, that is not simple. But that's part of the experience, is I have to actually go through this process of being on a wait list, buying four other Rolexes to be one of their key customers. Or when you look to, I think it was the Enzo Ferrari, it was invite only to purchase it when they released that. Now, you would think, well, actually, I've got two million pounds to pay here. Can I just have it? No, you can't. Speaker 1 (0:30) Hello and welcome to Just Branding. Speaker 1 (0:34) podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Kass and Matt Davies. Speaker 4 (0:54) Hi folks, Matt Davis here. If you're a designer, strategist, marketeer or brand builder, as I know many of you that listen to Just Branding are, then I've got a big question for you. Are clients paying you for your brain or are they still mainly hiring you as a pair of hands? Well, this October, I'm running the next cohort of my live course, How to Be a Brand Consultant. This is not a course teaching you how to do brand strategy because as a listener to Just Branding, I'm assuming you already know your stuff. Instead, I'll show you how to turn that expertise into a consulting practice, moving upstream, solving bigger, higher impact business problems and delivering more value and importantly, charging more for the work that you do. Across four live sessions, we'll work on your positioning, your offer, your sales, and your growth, including things like pricing, winning better clients, and building a sustainable pipeline. You'll also get three months inside my Brand Mastermind group for ongoing support. The course starts on the 12th of October and I'm keeping the cohort deliberately small. So if you're ready to stop being hired as a pair of hands and start being valued and paid for your brain, come and join us. Head to mrmattdavis.me and look for how to be a brand consultant. I'll see you there. Speaker 4 (2:25) Hello folks, welcome to this episode of Just Branding. Brands spend an absolutely enormous amount of time thinking about how they look, what they say, how they present themselves to the world. But we know that ultimately brands are experienced by human beings, by end consumers. And we know that those human beings, sometimes, I would pretty much say all the time, are not really rational in the way that they think and behave. We're all emotional beings influenced by context and various other key things. So we're not robots. So if we want to manage meaning, if we want to build brands, it's so important that we get our heads around consumer behavior, customer behavior, you could call it, and behavioral science. Today in this episode, we are exploring a simple question. What can behavioral science teach us about creating better customer and therefore brand experiences? And we have an amazing guest to go into this subject with. Today we're joined by Cy Elliott, a customer experience expert who spent the last two decades exploring the intersection between digital progress. and human connection. Sai began his career in marketing and today co-owns creative agency Diversity and is the founder of customer experience consultancy Fabrics, where he combines behavioral science with practical strategy to help organizations create experiences that genuinely resonate with people. On top of that, if that wasn't enough, he's also an award-winning guest lecturer at Nottingham Trent University here in the UK, the University of Nottingham, and the Communication University of China, as well as sitting on academic advisory boards spanning business and psychology. And perhaps most relevantly, he is the author of a new book that's just come out this year, Customer Experience Thinking, a practical guide to using behavioural science to build deeper, more meaningful... customer relationships. Si, welcome to the podcast. Speaker 2 (4:35) Thank you for that introduction. There's very little I can say now. I think you've pretty much cut off everything I've done. Speaker 4 (4:40) Let's wrap it up. Well, I think we could tuck into one small story, and that's how we first met. Do you want to sort of, you know, open up that can of worms? Speaker 2 (4:49) Yeah, so 2004, I think it was, our creative studio was a little bit overloaded with work. So we went out to some freelance designers here in Nottingham and A very energetic young chap with a lot of hair arrived through the door. Did some fantastic work with us. So I can vouch that the work was very good. And we've been in touch ever since. And I think it's always interesting when you have and you've just reeled off a lot of things that I've done. And the reason I've done that is because I've been around for so long. But I think it's really interesting when you have more than two decades of experience. in a market in an area in a niche uh to see the people that keep coming back into your kind of revolving around your world and your ether as well and your network and yeah it's great to see what you're doing it's fantastic to meet uh jacob as well and i've got a few questions for jacob a little bit later on as well uh That's a whole different thing. Well, Speaker 4 (5:49) thanks for so much for carving out some time. I think it was a couple of years ago, we were in a Starbucks and you mentioned this book that was coming out and now it's here. So congratulations on launching it. We're going to get into that. But one thing I was just going to touch on, I think what's interesting about our connection is that in effect, we've both had, I would say, sort of similar but different sort of approaches in our career, which is that I think we've gone up the value ladder, if you like, in the sense of how are we really creating stuff that that has real true meaning and value for customers. And, you know, coming from the design and creative side, that's where my career has gone more into the strategy side. And I know yours has also, and slightly differently, but ultimately kind of ending up on that side of things, which is less about, I guess, the fonts, the colours and the shiny bits, and more about the true, for you, the customer experience that really kind of generates value. Speaker 2 (6:43) Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, You touch on the book, and I'm sure we'll chat through that a little bit. And that was certainly a labour of love. I know you're working on one at the moment. I know, Jacob, you've been through that process as well. And that was a commitment device. I just told everybody I'm writing a book because eventually, every time you see someone, they go, how are you getting on with the book? You go, yeah, I need to complete that. But yeah, an absolute curse of optimism. I thought I'd have the book done in a year. It took three years. And hopefully there's some value that people can get out from that but certainly and i know you know we haven't teed up the two letters of ai yet but it was we're never going to get through this without unscathed without talking about that that wasn't even in my thinking when i started the book but it's certainly become more important and the point you touched on now for anybody working agency side a designer people at the moment that maybe have some worries about what's happening in the world that moving up the value chain and adding the thinking in is absolutely critical now it's never been more important it's never and i think when we touch on what you you guys do from a brand perspective i genuinely think that now is might be the most important time in history to get brand right Agreed. Agreed. Okay. Well, look, before Speaker 4 (7:59) we tuck into some of that stuff, let's just start with basics, right? Because, you know, we have a varied audience that tune in and we always like to kind of lay some groundwork first. We love definitions on the Just Branding podcast just to kind of start us off. So the book's called Customer Experience Thinking. Perhaps, you know, we could kind of get you to give us a definition of what that is. What is customer experience thinking? Speaker 2 (8:22) So customer experience is just the perception of feelings that people have with the interactions or the experience they have with you, your product, your service or your brand. So in simple terms, that's all it is. And it lives in the mind of the customer. So we're trying to influence that. But fundamentally, customer experience is always from the other side of the fence. And a lot of brands think about what they're delivering as customer experience rather than what's been received. trying to flip that on its head and walk in their shoes a little bit more. Love that. Speaker 4 (8:54) Love that. So why is that important, do you think, to having that kind of mindset around human behaviour? Why is that important to creating those experiences for businesses and brands? Speaker 2 (9:08) Well, let's think about why does a business exist at all? It's to serve someone. and hopefully have a value exchange where you get compensated for that service to the other side. So I think modern marketing and certainly technology has really driven us down a line of... thinking about conversion, thinking about this user, that metric. And we actually need to take a step back and go, we're actually serving people at the end of the day. A lot of the work you guys will be doing in your day jobs is not just about selling into a business. It's serving those people within the business. And I feel in marketing, we're losing a little bit of sight on that. Certainly with big data, certainly when we look at Think about the social platforms and the ability to reach such a large audience. I feel we're starting to lose a little bit of connection with the fact that it's the person on the other side that we're serving. And the brands that do it super well and I think are going to be really successful moving forward are those that keep that in mind and remember, I'm here to serve you. So my book is written to hopefully serve value to you and therefore it's worth. the money you've paid for it, and it creates that value. So I've had to write it with you in mind, not in mind of just this is what I want to say. Right. Speaker 3 (10:30) How did you come to the idea of writing a book? Speaker 2 (10:34) Well, partially, there's a big personal side to it. I've got two young daughters, and 11 and 14, they're digital natives. They're growing up in a world that is so different to the world I grew up in 40-odd years ago. And I now observe that. And think, well, what they're coming into, how well is it serving them versus they're serving it? So how much is the technology the master rather than the other way around? So I was starting to just observe this and think about the marketing industry in general and how we're, as I say, we're starting to focus more on metrics, users, conversion rate, rather than delivering out to people. And that's been accelerated. in recent years but from the start of the book it was really looking at that and looking at this whole trend of we're more connected than ever but potentially more lonely we're a lot more plugged in these notifications going off i feel it when i think about starting out in a design creative studio here in nottingham i was doing two or three ad campaigns a week. And I used to wait for an ISDN line to slowly tick along. And that's great. And now I look at the speed that my team are working at, the amount of notifications going off. You've got Slack, you've got Teams, WhatsApp's going off, emails people are expecting instant answers on. Everything's ramping up, but we've still got these prehistoric brains that have been formed over thousands of years. And we're not having hardware updates with our brains as quickly as the technology is. So I'm looking at it and thinking, well, us as marketeers, we have a responsibility. We fund a lot of what happens in technical development because it's us that is paying these platforms, wanting to have our presence on there. So just thinking about that. And I was seeing a lot of clients having that frustration with, I think, the pace of optimization and wanting to build something that's a little bit more long term. So that was kind of the two things coming together, my two worlds colliding together. into a well why don't you've got an opinion why don't you start to write book you lecture on these things why don't you get it down and pay because there's also only so many conversations you can meet lifetime so you know hopefully people will pick this book up and go i did some interesting things in there but i'm going to move on to the next level like the great books i've read over the years that's part of my evolution in my thinking i want to just be a little one of those little ticks in someone else's evolution along the way where they start to maybe question things a little bit differently. And I've given my daughters the book and asked them to think about their decisions as consumers when they're trying to buy stuff online as well. Love that. And I think you're so right. Speaker 4 (13:20) Short-termism, it can be such a drug, right, for businesses, particularly big organizations where, you know, people are so desperate to justify their existence. And if they can point towards some data somewhere, you know, it feels rational and it feels lovely. And, you know, they can kind of justify their existence when, as you say, if we lose sight of the basic thing, which is as a business, you're there to serve someone else, you're there to serve their need today. If you think just about that, you've got a problem because really you want to be thinking, I'm here to serve you for as long as you need me to. You know, that could be for years. And if you've got a short-term focus and your teams are all driven, short-term, short-term, short-term, they sometimes might make a decision which, yeah, will benefit the customer. and themselves in the short term, but might damage the long-term relationship. And that, I think, is sometimes how businesses and brands get themselves into difficulty. Anyway, what I was going to say was, let's shift gear a little bit and dive into this like full on, right? Because I know in your book, you go through, which by the way, just to lend my endorsement to it, I think everybody on this who's listening to this should definitely grab a copy. We'll give details in a minute of where you can get it. Let's just go into some of the principles that you outline. I think you go through like eight key principles of customer experience. So I was wondering if you'd be open to outlining those for us and then perhaps we could dive in and unlock a couple and kind of get into some nitty gritty. Would you be open to that? A Speaker 2 (14:52) hundred percent. Well, let's start with why are they principles and not rules or laws? And it's, you know, I'm not necessarily the most linear of characters myself. As I would imagine, many great entrepreneurs, business leaders, designers, brand strategists are as well. So their principles, because my school reports would tell you this, I didn't always follow the rules. But it's something that over time that I've just crafted these through. So A, where we look at considerate detail and how they work together, set, manage and exceed expectations, personalised for the individual, on their terms and put them in control. minimizing effort and stress, considering the identity and emotions, learning and building relationship over time and considering all the senses. And they'll map against whether it's accessible, functional or emotional or a series of those. And they just help, I think, give foundational building blocks to start planning your work around. The second half of the book dives into behavioral science, which takes it to a slightly different place. But that start point is things that... we've been working with clients for years on trying to put a little bit of a structure behind it but i refuse to call anything beyond principles because i don't want to be held to it in the fullness of time we're allowed to rethink at some point but certainly you know those are the important things that for me when you guys are a brand exercise i've got a i've got to live up to your brand exercise putting them through this lens of these eight principles and really testing my metal against that yeah Speaker 4 (16:24) i mean some some of them particularly for the designers who are listening in, will be really obvious. Like that first one, consider every detail and how they work together, right? I guess from a visual perspective, a lot of people are familiar with that, but it goes beyond Speaker 2 (16:37) that, doesn't it? Absolutely. So as humans, we're kind of hardwired to notice differences in environments and things that don't quite join up. Usually that could be, and I'll quite often talk about our prehistoric roots where you're a caveman. You'd be looking out for those cubes. Speaker 3 (16:55) You're like the third guest recently Speaker 4 (16:58) that said that I'm a bit caveman-like. I will accept it, Speaker 2 (17:02) but I'm getting a little nervous. Carry Speaker 4 (17:04) on. Speaker 2 (17:06) But you, evolutionary, have to look out for risks. So you look for inconsistencies, slight things, and then you go, do I trust this now? And it will be the same in any brand exercise as well, where we need to be... consistent across the piece because otherwise i won't believe your claim if in three places you say it but in one place you contradict it and that's when i just think about wording and the things that you're promising before then i look at what you're doing visually so if i think about consistency visually if you say we are an authentic people first brand and then you're using ai generated content on social i don't believe your first claim now So consistency is really important. And I think that's a tough one for designers because you like novelty. You like to change things up, freshen things up. So for then someone to go, no, no, we need to be super consistent is tough. And a couple of episodes ago, and I can't remember your guest's name now off the top of my head, but when they talk about Marlborough and then designing things in green. everything's got to come back. Consistently, it's a tough one. It is a tough one because we also like novelty ourselves. And when you're working on something so much, you forget that it's 100 % of your headspace. But for the consumer, it's that fleeting thing that they see once every four months for 30 seconds. Speaker 4 (18:33) Such a great point. And I see it all the time. Like, you know, on a macro scale, you get a new CMO in, they want to... stamp their authority upon the brand literally take it in a different direction and you know again going back to that first point like is this how we serve people you know well like i'm working on a big project at the moment in the us and um it's a brand relaunch and it's going to market we've got ad tv spots and all sorts going out and i had to have a really serious conversation with the brand director over there because they asked for in this particular project, for example, different strap lines to the end of every ad. And my position was, look, you know, we should stick to one really strong because we want to kind of be really clear about what we