All Touchpoints, All The Time
I end up drawing this diagram of the “Touchpoints” on a whiteboard several times a week:
Read it clockwise from the upper-right, and the chart describes the consumer’s complete experience with a product:
- Become aware of a product or service
- Learn about it
- Purchase it
- Prepare to use it
- Use it
- Contact the manufacturer (e.g. for service)
- Retire the product
- Renew and start again
They’re called “Touchpoints” because, seen discretely, each stage is an opportunity for the company to touch the consumer. But that’s also part of the problem with product development, where the Touchpoint cycle is typically seen as a timeline - a set of events in the consumer’s life with a product that happen one after the other.
The design team influences a couple of the Touchpoints - Prepare and Use. Advertisers influence others. The service department influences still others. The problem is that the groups often don’t work from the same playbook: each is interpreting the intent of the product differently. It’s a big game of telephone: Marketing describes a product to design, who designs something close but not quite; Manufacturing builds something close to the design but not quite; Sales interprets the product slightly differently in explaining it to the consumer who then expects the product to be close to what it really is, but not quite, etc. etc. In developing their Touchpoints, each group has a different understanding of what the product is supposed to be. So each Touchpoint provides a different experience, and the result is confused: depending on where a consumer is in the cycle, he’ll see a different version of the product vision.
Really successful brands don’t treat the Touchpoints like telephone, but rather as a system orbiting a single vision. The iPod, iTunes, and the iTunes store are all manifestations of one view of how the digital music experience should be. Every aspect of flying on Virgin Atlantic reinforces the Virgin thing. These companies design every Touchpoint to be an instantiation of the vision; instead of the brand being the result of the product, the product is expressing the brand.
Seeing the Touchpoints as a system of brand expressions instead of a timeline lets us create, instead of a loosely-related series of experiences, a unified experience. Of course, it requires the company to take a big step back and first create that vision from which all brand experience flows.
Can your company do that? Why not?
