Igniting Customer Connections: Fire Up Your Company's Growth By Multiplying Customer Experience & Engagement

Chapter 4The Amplification EffectMultiply the Power of Experience × Engagement

We've explored how customers feel about a brand (experience) and how they interact with a brand (engagement) in real time via various channels. These two elements are more than two different ways that brands connect with customers. They are the ways that customer connections happen. In Part Two, we will see empirical evidence that improving experience and engagement creates a multiplicative effect on the financial performance of customers and the communications that touch them. Here we explore how the powerful combination of Experience × Engagement represents a fundamentally new model for marketing—and for planning and allocating your marketing budget.

Defining Experience × Engagement

Let's start by taking a closer look at the terms used to define customer connection—experience and engagement. The words are used loosely in a variety of marketing contexts and are often misused and confused. It's important to establish a canonical definition, since it informs the research in the remainder of this book. Here are the definitions that we have established for Igniting Customer Connections:

• Experience means the emotional connection with a brand. How does it make you feel? Will your life be easier or your self-esteem higher? Will you have more friends? Experience is at the heart of the basic drive that consumers feel to try a brand, to purchase a brand, and to become loyal to that brand.
• Engagement means ...