Laura Schultz: Hi, everyone! I'm Laura marketing director here at Lippincott. Welcome to the latest episode in our 2025 Webinar series. Really excited to have you here. It's going to be a great session just to know that we'll be doing Q. And at the end of the episode, but feel free to submit your questions at any time during throughout the presentation. You could just do it in the little Qa. Box at the bottom, and then we will address them at the end. With that I'll turn it over to Tom and Cole, our esteemed host, to take it away.

Tom Ajello: Thanks, Laura, appreciate you. Hi! Everyone! Welcome to the Lippincott session titled from CX to BX. Check your notes, make sure you're in the right place. We're excited to talk to you today. My name is Tom. I'm a senior partner here at the firm, lucky enough to overlook our experience, innovation, and engineering practice. And I'm joined by.

Cole Nielsen: I'm Cole, partner of experience strategy over here at lip and cot it's really nice to be with you all today.

Tom: Yeah. So we've got you guys for about the next hour, excited to take you through some interesting content that we've been working on talking about the land of customer experience and infusing it with brand for next level growth. Just a few slides very quick ones on Lippincott. Hopefully many of you know us for any new faces nice to meet you. Lippincott is a tenured global brand experience in marketing consultancy. We think of ourselves as the original doers and thinkers founded way back in 1943, we were the firm that coined the term corporate identity and have been trailblazing ever since. We work with a lot of really interesting clients across a variety of industries. Cole and I get to work together on a couple of these clients every day and append a lot of the content that you're going to look at today through our experience and working together with customer experience organizations and brand organizations potentially like yourselves.

From an integration perspective, the waterfront of how you could think about Lippincott from unlocking new growth. Of course, all the things that you could imagine from a brand and portfolio level standpoint, maximizing the CX and BX. Or brand experience marketing strategy, customer engagement and inspiring and empowering employees. A full service firm. We're streaming to you today from New York, but we are situated globally and if you have more questions, Laura will be happy to answer them.

With that, I'm going to take you into our agenda for today. We're going to cover this idea of branding the CX. And what that means and our experiences in doing so. We're going to talk about trust a lot today, tackle a new idea we want to share with you, called the 4th persona. Cole's going to take you through our BX toolkit and hopefully save time for Q&A. And with that I'm going to hand it to Cole.

Cole: Yeah. So first, we want to talk about a little bit of a myth and a truth. Here, Tom mentioned, we've worked with a lot of incredible CX leaders and have grown to understand through their experience and through our own experiences. Sometimes some of the tension that comes in that job. There's a perception that CX is really about fixing things, removing pain points but not really about driving perception or preference, or sort of any of the juicier parts that a lot of times a brand gets the credit for. What we really believe, though no, to be true is that CX does deliver the brand. It stops being a service and becomes a signal. And that's really what we want to talk to you about today is when Brand and Cf come together. So yeah, on this next page.

But unfortunately, a lot of times that dynamic is missed. Brand gets to be seen as sort of the promise, the story, the sort of emotional part of things, and so often experience, is sort of put as delivery sort of how you're delivering to customers. There is no difference. They really have to come together, and that's where the magic really happens. They amplify each other. Brand is experience. And this is an easy thing to say.

But the truth is that brand is experience. Every way that you touch a brand is experiential. We are experiential beings, right? Everything we are. We are sensing beings. We seal, we see, we feel, we touch, we taste. Whether it's an email, a product, a website, a job interview an engagement with your boss, a webinar that you're attending. Everything is experienced, and that means when your brand sits at the center of that. It doesn't just drive the customer experience. It drives the experience of how the whole organization shows up.

And yes, on that next page, while it is easy to say that brand and experience are 2 sides of the same coin. The realities of both of those roles, and both of those responsibilities, and even mindsets are often very, very different.

So often we see Brand getting to sit at that 30,000 foot level. What is the vision and experiences sort of in the weeds trying to deliver against that vision. It requires different minds. It requires different KPIs and the actual alignment. The harmony between those 2 ideas, those 2 parts of an organization is extremely difficult to actually deliver against.

Now, there's also a gap right when you ask leaders if they believe that customer experience is important and how much are they prioritizing it through the roof? Right? 95% believe it's important. 80% believe that they're doing a great job of delivering that customer experience. It really falls off, though when you ask customers, are you delivering a customer experience? Only 8% are saying that is happening.

Tom: And how do we react as a customer experience organization? Well, if Google image searches, is any indication, we create millions and millions of journey maps, experience maps and documentation of customers within an inch of their life and their experience, tracking them in every nook and cranny of their existence. And while this is cathartic for the boardroom, it's cathartic at the executives table, the brand, and the experience ultimately should build trust. But too often the journey map is a receipt for an action, and perhaps even creates opportunities for friction versus fueling trust or ensuring that what you stand for in the experience that you create are uniquely linked.

And this isn't a session to beat up journey maps. But you know one of the things that we think a lot about in doing journey maps is how they're not just the end of the story, but the beginning of the story, and there's a number of traps to navigate through. Journey, map creation, the momentum trap where you've arrived at a confident sort of production because the empathy work is done with care but from a documentation perspective you kind of get that box checked feeling which creates not a false sense of progress on your team, but perhaps across the organization. Okay, we've done something about this. Well, you haven't right And then there's the connection. Trap journey maps imply cohesion. But the CX. Is still fragmented. Right? We've got a great piece of content you could find on our site written by our own Ben Le. It talks all about the flight of the bumblebee, and that today's behaviors, customer behaviors mimic this, this bumblebee flight rather than the sort of linear tractor beam decision making that journey maps are so well known. For how do you predict all of that ecosystemic behavior? You need new tools for that.

And then there's the ownership trap. Who's gonna fix, you know? Who are we gonna agree on? That's gonna own, and fix this this moment in the journey, or all the moments in the journey or micro journeys within it, and then, finally, the sort of catharsis component, the everything trap journey maps themselves become a quest for total coverage. But in that total coverage have we achieved success. And so for our 1st poll, just one of the things we want to prompt you on is to think about your journey maps that you've done, perhaps in your organization. And whether or not they've been successful in driving impact.

Maybe they've driven a little impact. Maybe they've been very impactful. Yeah, so pretty much spread all over the board. But a lot of you talking about somewhat impactful. And I think that's not an uncommon reaction, right? And they're expensive to execute. They're time consuming. And so is there? Is there another way. Is there another way to think about journey management and also thinking about how to maximize the experience?

So we're gonna move on to the next segment, and kind of continue the thread a bit. And you know this. This idea about journey maps, and the notion that they themselves are supposed to be a beacon of trust. This idea of trust is an important component to not just the brands that we create, but the obviously the experiences that we deliver. And this is a thread that we're going to pull on for a bit here. So to start off, we're gonna have a little fun. Let's play the world's fastest lesson on building trust.

So do you know who this is? How about now? Now? A little moment there might have been the giveaway. It's an interaction, actually. And it's designed to make you feel something. So there's a memorability component. And there's a storytelling component right? That's being sort of echoed. Perhaps in your head.

Rhetorically, of course, but perhaps that made you feel welcomed. Maybe you remembered a moment. Maybe you felt seen or heard. The thing you're reacting to in that moment is the logo, but the logo itself, as an emblem of the brand triggers. The memory and the memory is the experience, be it the name written on the cup that signature little Starbucks interaction?

Or maybe or maybe it's a moment in the community where Starbucks was has become a environment that you enjoy spending time at, and everything in between right, the communication of the logo from a uniqueness and an expectation. Perspective sets a foundation to build trust but the trust itself comes through action.

That's the heart of BX, right? A vessel for trust, building. The overarching CX. Is a vessel to bring the brand to life across moments, offerings and interactions, to instill belief, to double down on that notion of memorability, and to encode something greater than yourself. This notion of trust and recognition for what you deliver.

Starbucks is really good at building what are called trust signals having an ecosystemic idea to all that they bring to the table, whether it's consistency in design, whether it's social moments that we all refer to and talk about at the water cooler signature interactions of your name on the cup which incidentally went away, and now has come back in the form of little messages to you experiences and expressions of our feeling, and the list goes on, and all of these things tie together to mean something bigger, and to continue that thread of trust to you as an individual. Setting expectations, delivering against those expectations and doing it again and again and again, right. Starbucks in Italy and Rome gives you a very similar experience to a Starbucks that you may have in Seattle or in New York City.

And so in this way, trust is. It's not a message, right? It's a system. It's an ecosystem of all of these things working together all the time. A network of touch points, a network of of social interactions all building into this idea of trust.

So with that, we have one more question for you, thinking to yourself through the poll, what's 1 thing your brand says that it does, but maybe doesn't deliver. And if you have other ideas in the chat that aren't listed here would love to hear them. Whether that's consistency, speed, creativity being simple and clear. We'll give it a few minutes, few seconds.

Cole: Feel like empathy is such a big one. So many brands want to be human and want to express that care for their customer base, but so hard to scale empathy.

Tom: Alright consistency gets the ringer.

Cole: 47%.

Tom: Ease of use. Not a lot of others. Great. Yeah, I'm curious in the chat. As we go forward. If people want to sound off about. Maybe the struggles that you have from a consistency perspective. Be curious to know if you know you guys can help each other out. Are there things that you're both grappling with? From a consistency perspective that could be interesting to unpack as we get to Q&A.

You're sort of sitting here, probably, as we almost did in in crafting this story, Thinking to yourself, well, trust. I mean, that's not. That's not new, right? We've been building brands for years, that's I mean, I'm sure there's a book or 2 on all of our desks. It's all about the notion of trust and the our ability to build trust as a brand and what it means.

Well, the same trust that you and I create between a friend in order to build a friendship the same trust that we build as a brand. In fact, we're inviting the brand into our lives. And it's this human idea of trust that also AI has been built around in terms of understanding you and auditing you and paying attention to who you are and what you stand for, and whether or not your experience corroborates that story and if your brand isn't aligned and doesn't connect those dots just like that friend right? Where the message didn't matter or the story didn't match the experience.

AI will step away just like you might from that associate or that friend where that trust was worn. And unfortunately for brands today with AI being as powerful and as scaled as it is. That means AI won't surface you. We've been recently adoption rates over time of tech versus AI. Pretty fascinating a hundred million users in 2 months. But you know the point. Here is audiences are shifting faster than traditional models can track and rather than go down, tore down our social media memory lane. I think it's just important to recognize the power that AI has because of how multi-generational it is and how easy it is for you and I to interact with an LLM.

And the results from a search perspective are kind of staggering right? Search behavior is completely being redefined. You and I are now going to the perplexities of the world. The Chat GPTs of the world to get in and get out quickly and get the answer we need. And we're not necessarily interested in a click. Certain types of searches. We want to have that click, and we'll still go to Google, which now has Gemini. And that click may also be buried which is frustrating for some users and certain searches are just far and away more informational and therefore content. Strategy doesn't fully support. And so the idea of connecting and engaging with somebody through our long form. Storytelling is completely shifting right now. The idea of visibility still matters. But in a world where AI overviews and using search for support are using LLMs for search support means that the clicks aren't guaranteed. In fact, far from it.

And this means we're shifting from this idea of measuring clicks and traffic to literally measuring trust. Watch this space for brand trust metrics. In fact, Ahrefs, who had a stat on the previous slide, is launching a brand trust platform. So it's not just about our AI overviews intercepting traffic. But it's what's happening in those overviews that's changing the dynamic of how we must behave as brands in order to ensure that we get surfaced.

And you know the new search landscape that's emerging, which is today, typical classic search engine optimization which we still have as a backdrop, and hasn't completely gone away. Let's call that keyword mentality and answer. Engine optimization and generative engine optimization are now all kind of mashed together. And so we need to parse them. And we need to understand them individually. And we need to make sure that our strategies support them so that we can.

We can ensure, not just our own visibility, but durability right of our story and getting our story out there and that, my friends, comes all the way back to who you are, what you stand for, and how you consistently get that message out in the world.

And this is what we mean when we say and we talk about AI really is your 4th persona. It's seeing and interacting with and understanding and processing your content. It's processing how you show up in the world. It's processing all those nodes in that ecosystem and corroborating that story right connecting the dots across the ecosystem to see if the message matches not just what you say, but what you do.

And in this way the AI persona that we all use, and that is also observing us has become the most influential and impartial customer you've ever targeted, and in that way. It learns from every page, every post, or every signal, as we say you publish whether you meant it to or not. And so you may have content out there that inadvertently doesn't feel like your brand, and in that content existing in that way it actually can detract the change from the piggy bank of the brand, because AI, having the power that it has, it, can also pull away from the definition of who you are and what you stand for in people's eyes.

Cole: So an example of that. This is a successful B2B company, who is writing a conversation or writing an article about conversational orchestration. Tom, you can press play. Let's get. This rolling question is, can we trust this? So introduction of a metaphor, we're bringing it down. We extend the metaphor. Then we start talking about agents. There's a there's a lot of details in here, obviously, graphs and notation. All that sort of stuff that we want to feel confidence but as I'm going through this one, I'm really struggling to read a 4,000 word essay here, but I'm kind of starting to lose the thread of that orchestration story. It feels like I was promised something elegant and beautiful and cohesive, and what I got was a dump of words. I'm sort of being asked to do a lot of work there to connect dots that are starting to feel a bit disparate this is making. This is inside of me creating dissonance between what I'm being told and what I'm experiencing, that dissonance detracts from trust. So this brand is a brand that talks about being human and honoring people's time, making conversations, transitioning conversations. In online support forums easier than ever. And yet I'm being treated to an extremely long article here that I'm having to parse through in a way that is not easing me in and through the experience. Again, it uses this metaphor kind of moves around, and I'm trying to track it. What is orchestration versus agent? So on and so forth. The tone, the language, everything feels like it is veering off course.

We wanna make sure that we're mapping to commitments, that when we do introduce language, that we build equity in that language, really clearly connect the dots for our users, and make sure that those commitments, those ideas, those tonalities, are expressed everywhere, not just in the campaign that you spend a bunch of money on, and run on YouTube or buy at the front of a podcast but even in a moment like this, you know what we want to make sure that the brand is showing up strongly, consistently, and clearly for our audiences. And so the lesson that we want to take away from this is quite simply, just, don't make your audience do the work. Don't make AI interpret your intent. AI, like humans is this persona that is tracking you is understanding you. And one of the things that we talk a lot about is while humans can. With all of our good intentions, we can be fallible. We can forget. We can sort of give into what's convenient.

AI sort of understands what we want. But it doesn't have those same limitations. So it's really able to track the way that your brand shows up. And notice any time that either you're being inconsistent with your message or your message is not reaching your audience in the way that you want to be so align your creative expression with structural clarity, make it easy to understand who you are and what you deliver at scale.

So I'll just think for a second and give you 30, 45 seconds. So visibility isn't learned through cleverness. It's earned through consistency. Where do you think you could be more consistent in your Vx in your brand experience. And again, I don't know if the chat is alive or not, but if anybody does want to share places where you think you could be more consistent. Please do so. Otherwise. Just kind of keep that in the back of your head as we continue to go through the rest of this content together.

Tom: So a little bit of a recap there. But this notion of trust right. It is incumbent upon us to know who we are and what we stand for, and to make sure that we are not just telling that story. But we're crafting an experience that corroborates that story. Now, this was always true but you can get away with annoying a customer once in a while. You can get away with not being perfectly aligned to your purpose or to your commitments.

But in a world where clicks are eroding and being surfaced through, ask engines is becoming critically more important. Your most influential customer, AI, is now arming your other customers and itself with information, and it can only process the schema and the stories and the purpose and the commitments that you give it and if you don't give it, others will.

And the combination of those 2 things works just like the game of influencing the influencer, like we've all learned in social media for the last 20 years. So a clear brand point of view and commitments must be alive in the BX. We'll talk about what that means for us in terms of brand strategy, work and experience strategy work that we do.

You need to reinforce your tone across the ecosystem right? Because AI can understand those different inferences. It also will look at metaphor. It'll look at nuance like orchestration as Cole talked about a second ago, and try to connect the notion of orchestration back to something. You can actually literally watch operator or a deep research AI tool work harder when you give it something to chew on, and it'll come across an article that's about orchestration when the content isn't about music, let's say, and it will think to itself. Hmm! This is a novel idea. Let me dig deeper into that, and it goes off on a tangent. It actually makes you work harder. It's working harder to sort of understand and unpack.

If you don't have schema for that right, the connection of orchestration to who you are and what you stand for. It creates a rabbit hole and rabbit holes in this space. Not good. Additionally, proof points are becoming proof. Touch points right? We always know we have to have proof points on our content. Our touch points are also living and breathing proof. And again your customers aren't just auditing those in a form that you can get away with. But AI is as well. And then finally, constant signature experiences that extend the message, the name on the cup. Right? The little things that become sort of mnemonically, you intrinsically you right. The things that are memorable and that can stick behind that comments and references can be made of all of those things connect the dots that letters right back to who you are, what you stand for, and how you show up in the world, and whether or not, you get credit for that exact idea in terms of differentiating yourself.

Cole: Now I know that the I think we all know the climate around AI right now is charged. Some people are really excited about it. Some people are really scared about it myself, as a practitioner, have actually found a lot of excitement and solace actually, in this idea that AI is tracking thing it is. It is trying obviously to imitate the way that we perceive value, the way that we build. Trust the way, what we expect from our the people, the brands that we engage with. And so the fact that the way to be understood or trusted by AI is actually the same as what it takes to be trusted by humans too sort of as a really encouraging idea to me. And it really tells me again, as a strategist, as a designer as a brand leader. What we want to do is we can't rely on any tricks. We can't try to sort of hack our way to success.

What we want to do is really double down in delivering value in delivering trust and really being consistent the whole way across our brand. So we do want to kind of take you through a little bit of how we think about bringing that all together. We talk about the BX toolkit. So, BX, obviously brand experience on the next page, we can kind of open this up. We look at it as 3 component parts really having a strong sense of purpose, knowing who you are, why you matter and what you're gonna do about it.

Story is crucial. All of these things, again, are deeply rooted in human truths. We are a storytelling species, right? Like we build societies, companies, brands countries off of stories. And it's crucial that we communicate what's inside of us to someone else, to share understanding.

And then last engagement? What actually happens? How do I show up with you? How do I show up for you? How do I exist in relationship to you? These things, when they're working in harmony, can be a cohesive brand experience. And in today's super high expectations from customers, from AI, we need to create that absolute alignment between what we say and what we do to double into purpose here for a second, again, the sort of sense of just human truths at the core of all of this Dr. DeFore here says that it all begins with self-awareness, your success, your health, the quality of your relationships, all hinge on the depth and accuracy of your self-awareness. If you don't know who you are.

Other people don't actually know how to engage with you when you do know who you are. You know how you want to move through the world, and when you know how you want to move through the world, you're aware of how you are engaging with others when you're aware of how, under others understand you. You have that shared understanding. Then you can manage that relationship well. But without that core sense of self, that core sense of purpose. As individuals we struggle and as brands we struggle.

And on the next page we have this quote from Michael Cooley, every activity that is not aligned with your purpose is a waste of resource. It's pretty dramatic, but ultimately true. Right? We have finite time, resource, materials, money, bandwidth to achieve what we're trying to achieve and anything that veers off course is going to detract from that. It's going to deteriorate trust. And it's going to create some of the inconsistent customer experiences that many of you were noting as sort of a shortcoming of your organization.

So brands that get this right from the start. They're using brand platforms to translate who you are into, how you show up. And so it's not just an experience. We talk about this as a branded experience, or even a better branded experience on the purpose side. At Lippincott we really use these 2 components a lot of different frameworks out there have similar ideas, different names. But that brand platform really clearly communicating what you stand for, and then extremely important the commitments that you make. If I believe this, this is how I'm going to deliver that commitments are, they're the tangibly differentiating characteristics that we guarantee in our products and services. Those are the ways that we become known in the world, and those things together form our purpose. Those drive the way. The stories that we tell, the engagements that we create stories, visual and verbal expression. Your advertising, your comms, your messaging do know, like the visual representation of your brand, your identity, corporate identity, we see a story. It is storytelling, just like it is as people. The clothes we wear, the way we do our hair, shoes, glasses, all that sort of stuff. Tell a story about us. It's the same with Brand. And then when we think about engagement, this is our experience, design and strategy, and those signature moments and interactions that Tom's been talking about.

Tom: Commitments being alive in a business and a brand. You know you may not know whether a brand has a specific commitment, but you can feel the commitment. And now AI can audit it and understand it. And so it's so critical right that we that we document them because what gets documented gets done and when a commitment is at work, it's a difference, you can see. And you can feel one example. We like to use a lot, because we all have doctors, and we all need to deal with health is the example of one medical versus the digital experience and the overarching CX of one medical versus some of the health space competitors that most of us have experience with. And what's interesting about these competitors is they need to be frictionless the apps and the experiences of themselves. They need to just work. Because we're talking about your data. We're talking about your health there, right?

And so there's sort of an operational box checked. There's a logistics box checked, but none of them. There's ones that aren't on the list here on the left. None of them make you feel something. So then, on the other side, we have some brands that punch above their own weight in engagement and connection, teaching you something. You realize that they're there for you around every corner. And so we have to ask ourselves, right is this magic like, why are there so many brands or certain brands that really get this right?

And we believe it's the commitments. We believe it is the purpose. It's often the rights that they choose to wrong in the world and the commitments that they are going to execute in order to prove that they are who they say they are. And so for one medical, that's a better model of care, always being patient, centric and care at your fingertips and from being. If you are lucky enough to go to a 1 medical being and having an experience in the actual storefront. Cole was talking earlier today about talent and the way the humans of one medical interact with you to the care at your fingertips, and the notion of of always being patient centric weaving through everything you come away, not just with a sense of progress, but a sense of deeper connection to something that's now earned a share in your life.

Cole: And that brand, or sort of the talent part that you talked about, Tom, when you go, or when I went to one medical for the 1st time. You feel it sort of from jump. You walk in someone's greeting you, and honestly, like, I kind of like that. They just look very down to Earth, had some piercing names and dyes they were like, how's it going today? What are you here for, like? Oh, we see you've already logged in on your way. Cool like. Have a seat. Do you want some water? You know there's Spa water there, comfortable seats, interesting books a nice view and you know this isn't like a super expensive service that's being offered to me on top of you know the healthcare that I already have. It's an accessible price point. But I just go in there. And I'm like.

Oh, I feel cared for like I feel. This is like deeply human, and that's really hard to scale when you have offices all around the country. And I think our belief is that only scales through Brand when you have that shared sense of values is really the only way that can scale and so I want to just open it up for a second to think about your organization's purpose. How do you feel about your organization's purpose?

Is it not clearly defined? Does it maybe feel dated needs to be revisited is it maybe there, but not influencing sort of decisions as much as you would like it to be? Or does it feel really strong and guiding the way that you show up every day.  I'm actually encouraged by the strong. 33% that's really cool to hear, not surprised that 50% is the highest there, that we have a purpose. But it's not influencing the business decisions as much as it could. Okay, interesting, thanks.

Tom: Too much to get into that more deeply today. But you should really interrogate your commitments because the commitments are the language of love that takes the purpose and drives it deep into the organization.

Cole: So speaking of, we want to do a little click into commitments with you all here. So we worked with this gecko to help them sort of understand, maybe a new purpose that they stood for in the world. For years they've been known as just delivering sort of cheap, fast insurance, right. We worked with them to evolve that to an idea of where value is more than a claim that it's not just about speed. It's not just about the cheapest. It's about delivering value at every point beyond sort of the submission of the claims, or getting your paid for an accident, or whatever, and we worked with them to build commitments, one of them being frictionless freedom. Now, frictionless freedom. Again, a lot of people on the call here are CX people. We think of frictionlessness as removing any obstacles, and they've done that. They have a history and a legacy of removing obstacles, removing friction and speeding up and making easier the insurance process. They're clearly known for this idea of 15 min could save you 15% or more to the idea that if you just say 15. Probably everyone on this call can finish that saying. But they extended that into new innovative solutions like a 15 second claim.

A 15 second quote, actually using AI and other technology to deliver incredibly fast insurance interactions and found that people didn't want it which is so fascinating to us. And we asked ourselves. Why, they removed all the friction. You know I'm making a purchase of a couple $100 a month to protect me and my loved ones and my car and I can get a quote in 15 seconds. Why does that not feel good?

So much friction was removed that I actually no longer felt free in that moment I started to think, do I have to do a little bit more research on top of that. And so frictionless freedom isn't just about removing all friction. It's about removing the friction that allows people to help them feel free. We have this example. Tom, as we were working on this project was a car dealership tells the story. You know the salesperson is like, hey? Do you have your insurance? And Tom's like. Do I have it? Did I bring it? Is it in the car, is it whatever? And was kind of starting to feel, you know? Oh, shoot! Do I have what I need to make this go smoothly. And the guy at the dealership was like, Well, do you have Geico?

Tom's like, yeah. So he said, Oh, pull it up, pull up your app. He opened his app. Geico knew that he was at a dealership. My geolocation says, do you want to enter dealership mode clicked. Yes, and what happened was the app immediately surfaced all the documentation. Nothing else but just exactly what he needed. In that moment it removed all friction that was unnecessary, so that Tom could engage actually in the conversation and purchase that he wanted to be involved in.

That is an incredible experience that really we worked with them to sort of exemplify. As this is what we're talking about with frictionless freedom. In that moment you feel like the hero you feel like. You have exactly what you need to move forward now. It's not just sort of one off instances of delivering your commitments in the world that by itself is sort of like a tree falling in the forest. If no one hears it right, you have to build a whole ecosystem of experiences and expressions to deliver that PR articles and features, clear language that really unpacks? Why is dealership, mode delivering that value? Stories on it? Maybe influencer marketing promotions, actually having those guys at the dealership telling to offer it. Right? We need to think about the back end, the structural site information, the advertising that tells the story even further, again expanding the idea of value beyond money, to things like time, to things like freedom, to things like ease. All of that. When we create all of these things together, it starts to substantiate. What do we mean by frictionless freedom?

And on the next page Tom can see that like again. It's not just a 1 off touch point that we're trying to create here to deliver frictionless freedom. We want to sort of, we need to create more and more and more. So. They have AI claims, adjudication. They have instant payouts. They do have the clever commercial advertising. They have amazing, fast, friendly text, customer service. That truly is mind blowing.

We need to tell our customers, our audience that all of these things are part of an ecosystem. These touch points, as Tom said earlier, become proof points of an idea that Geico stands for frictionless freedom and frictionless freedom is part of the value that we promise to deliver beyond the claim. So the more you make good on all of your commitments, the more you build. Trust in your purpose. And that's what it really is about. We want to know what we stand for, deliver that consistently to our audience so that they know it, and they feel it.

We will do if it's okay. Well, we have one last lesson here, so it takes an ecosystem of proof. Touch points to make your purpose, real and meaningful in the hearts and minds of your customer. Quick little side note works with Moma. They're obviously an interesting and iconic institution. Do a lot of really interesting things in the world without this sort of orchestration of this ecosystem, so many of those things got lost. They felt that people didn't know why they, what they stood for in the world, why they mattered why, they were more than just an expensive museum in midtown, and really felt that purpose was not taking root in the hearts and minds of their customers.

We needed to work with them again, to bring purpose into every touch point. And then to tell people this is what that touch point is about. This is the proof behind it. This is our purpose.

Tom: Let's jump to Q&A.

Cole: Okay, so we'll do this really quick, just quick thoughts on some methods that we use. And you could use to bring your BX vision to life. So starting first, really understanding your purpose and your commitments getting in those commitments, and understanding what they mean in the lives of your customers and out in culture. We have a workshop that we like to do on the next page, where we actually bring people from all over the organization together in the sort of nascent moments of exploring the commitments to say, What does this mean in the world? What does this mean in your line of the business. What does this mean for your customers?

How would you employ this shape? It edit it so that everybody across the organization starts thinking cohesively around these commitments and what it would mean for their jobs, their business, their markets moving forward. It's a great way to make those commitments really, really strongly understood across the organization and actionable in these workshops. We say, if we stand for this, what would we need to do in order to make it real? So it's a great way of embedding sort of the heart of the brand across the organization.

Next thing you want to know who you're working for, who you're trying to serve is crucial right to understand, sort of to bring that empathy forward. So obviously, segmentations, things like jobs to be done so crucial, we create customer archetypes and story maps. And this is one of the sort of empathy building exercises that we like to do where we kind of create a day in the life of the people that we are designing for. We're building for we're serving.

And we want to know what are the context with which they're living in? What are they thinking? What are they reading? What are they struggling with? And where across these different touch points might our brand add value, and in what way?

Right? Sometimes it might be a service, sometimes it might be more content or information, sometimes it might be surfacing a partnership or sharing data by really sort of immersing ourselves deeply, deeply, in the lives of our customers, to the point where we become emotionally attached to these characters as we develop them and encourage you to do so, to know them, know their context, and find that sort of the 360 way that you can show up and add value in their lives.

And then last, we start to translate that into sort of the signature experiences. Encourage again this idea of building these out of the commitments, defining the ecosystem that exists around each one of those touch points, map it out, and then ultimately tell the story of it. We use things called experience maps. It's a moment to bring all of this together, to change the hearts and minds of the organization, to get everybody lockstep. Right to say, this is who we're building for. This is what we stand for. This is how we're delivering it so that we can all as an organization, you know. Walk, sort of lockstep forward, and bring that purpose to life. You want to wrap this up, Tom.

Tom: Yeah, so just a little recap. And I think we're gonna jump into Q&A 3 things, the 3 lessons that we learned today. 1st and foremost, it's time to double down on trust and you already know, as brand leaders the architecture for trust.

You just need to leverage it now and you need to leverage it, not just for building the brand, but for extending into the CX organization and helping infuse customer experience strategy with brand strategy and the fruits of that labor are not just customer joy, but it is feeding the beast of AI that is auditing every single one of those purpose points, positioning statements, big brand ideas and proof points, and trying to make sure that each of those things connect.

And that's really leads to our second lesson, which is, don't make your customers work. Don't make AI work harder because the harder AI has to work the more it's going to find further out, because it can now process more than keywords, whole concepts, right, whole matrix concepts. And it's using those for you and against you. And if you've already started seeing your click. Optimization is falling. It's because we need to rise up and start to put more credible, more interconnected and more thematic ideas. That ladder back to who we are, back into the ecosystem.

And then, finally that leads us to our 3rd point, which is, it takes an ecosystem of proof. Touch points to make your purpose real.

All of these one offs little individual moments that we looked at and talked about today. Dealership mode is a really fascinating one, because it's the embodiment of so many commitments and a whole brand personality it in and of itself is an exposure to embody and understand the brand through the vehicle of surprise and delight. It's a bullseye. But that bullseye has a whole sort of radius around it of other moments within the experience that we also need to account for that. We need to light up in the form of corroborating that story in the form of and storytelling and content that handles that for us in the form of markup and schema that has to be done in the right way, in order to make sure that our content can be traversed appropriately on one side of the spectrum, and on the whole other side of the spectrum. More proof points and more proof touch points that continue to build out this idea.

So if our commitment is frictionless freedom, what are other primary manifestations of being frictionlessly free? What are those other manifestations of value that we can put in market and then build the ultimate story around again back to the top of the board. Because AI is watching and customers are looking for that consistency. Lather rinse, repeat.

Cole: We have a few questions coming in and please keep more of them coming. It's exciting to see the way this is kind of resonating with you and the questions it's sparking. There are 2 that I would love to jump into and answer together. So the 1st one: can you talk about the difference between a journey map, a story map and an experience map? And the second, do you see a core difference between B, 2 B+B to C, as it relates to all of this. So when we talk about journey maps like we've said, it's really sort of a lot of times. It centers the product experience right? What are all of the touch points along the journey of where somebody is engaging with your product. So it really does center sort of your brand and your organization. And how you see that customer journey. When we think about story maps, we want to zoom out of us. It's centered on our audience, our customers, our characters, and really try and imagine quite literally a day in the life, and understand again, a 360 sort of contextual perspective, and when they might be coming into contact with our brand. And what this does actually is open up other places where we would say, Oh, they're commuting, you know. They're texting their partner about something with their family. Could we actually add value. In that moment it might not exist on our journey map.

But the story map, again centering in the customer allows for that to kind of reveal new opportunities. And then the experience map is kind of bringing all that together, a sort of happy path vision. It fuses. The brand is customer centric in the storytelling, and it articulates the key beats of how we deliver against the brand vision. Now is that difference between B2B and B2C. Of course there are different business implications. There are different considerations. But I think we really believe at the center of it all, we are people.

We want human centered brands. That is the sort of movement of the past decades. Right? We have a lot of wonderful B2B brands that are, quote unquote, behaving like B2C. In the way that they deliver content, content, connect with influencers, create incredibly creative and compelling marketing campaigns and experiences that sit in our phone alongside. You know the consumer apps that we use. We expect the same ease and simplicity and so we treat them very similarly. Of course, there are maybe more complexity that come in when you're on a B2B project. But a lot of the truths we believe exist across both, and we use the same process regardless of whether it's consumer brand or a business brand.

Anything you want to add to that, Tom? No, I'm actually typing an answer to number one so that you could keep going. Let's see what other questions are there? Do you want to say that out loud, though.

Tom: I could, I could just answer it out loud. Yeah. So to the question about measurement. Our recommended measurement concept is really laddering back to the barriers that you may know or need to do research to understand as a brand. And in this way brand metrics and CX. Metrics are very closely linked. And so if you think about a barrier for an organization, and just, I guess, to be crass right? Maybe a given organization is too big to see me, or maybe they're stubborn, or there's a coldness to their persona or their feel.

Those barriers are barriers to customer engagement. They're barriers to trust. They're barriers to people connecting to your primary belief system. And therefore that belief system not getting out there in the world not getting accessed. And so we want to share. We want to earn share of life. We want to earn time with these customers. But this is a blocker right and an opportunity to measure. Every barrier has an association, a sort of positive association that reduces that barrier right in the sort of tried example of being too big, being flexible, or being seen as nimble or agile or approachable has positive associations associated with it. And the more of those associations we drive the further down we reduce that barrier. And so you want to test for those associations in the context of experience, right? Not just through brand tests, but literally within the experience itself.

Ideally, within this, within the moments where the barrier is the most pronounced. Obviously we can't spend the whole workshop on unpacking that. But an exciting question, an interesting one. And we have a whole measurement team that would love to talk to you more about it.

Cole: So 4th question, when trying to get senior leadership outside of the brand and marketing on board with investing more in brand experience, how do you frame that message? Are there specific data points or stories that help it? Tom, I'm thinking about our brand aperture connection and progress that just by the numbers show that brands that have organizations. Let's call them organizations that deliver sort of the emotional connection that is usually associated with Brand and the progress that is usually associated with experience. They outperform, they outperform the class, they lap them, and I can't remember the exact numbers… at 5x.

Tom: 5x yes, and 11 times faster.

Cole: Yeah, so the numbers prove it out, and again, all the more so when those 2 are working together, when they're actually working in isolation when it's just a lot of connection or brand, or just a lot of progress experience. But the other lacks those numbers drop off significantly. So that's 1 point. And if you want to add anything to that.

Tom: No, that's also content. You could find on the website and easily shareable if you if you reach out after the after the workshop.

Cole: And then a quick one about, how do you do? Sort of journey and experience maps when you have varied customers? We would recommend that you do one for the customers like it's not. It does not just need to be one. We know that businesses are complex again, both consumer and business. B2B organizations are complex and brands need to be able to flex purpose. That purpose can stay consistent, and those commitments can stay consistent. But the way that they serve different audiences can and does need to flex and so typically when we're working with partners, and we encourage you to do the same? Really allow those things to be an interconnected ecosystem of different experience maps that again all ladder up to. How do we deliver this purpose across the range of our business?

Tom: Yeah. And I think that just to double down on that the notion of intersecting customers, in addition to doing parallel experience, maps or story maps. The notion of those customers intersecting, or the way one customer may intersect with another. That's that whole idea of the flight of the bumblebee right? And the way customers don't live linear lives, and the way they and the way the experience is an ecosystemic affair. And so our job is to think about those that interplay and leveraging that interplay, both for discovery of what makes someone tick, but also what products and services and experiences they're pulling into their lives that we can learn from. So it's such a powerful way actually to not just be shy of doing the extra ones, but then find the interplay and the way that they relate to each other. That also helps answer another question on the list. Just a quick one, which is, do we see a core difference between B2B and B2C, as it relates to this, I'm assuming. By this you mean the sort of overarching framework and process, and the answer is no, and sorta. All the tools are the same. But the influencer cycle, the way people tend to engage right? Those are different. But you know even your buyer of a you know airplane engine. They go to Starbucks, too. They know what it's like to skip the line and order ahead in traffic, too. Right? And so we have to remember that when we're building story maps, we're building empathy maps of how people behave. We want to understand real behavior. Cole talked about getting really close to that customer, and when you understand real behavior that starts to give you the unlock of their work life and their life and the interplay between those 2 things is so critical today. B2B or B2C.

Cole: There's a really interesting question about how do you get the organizations to buy in? Who are the buyers of this process? You know the CMO, the sort of the lead experience. I don't have a single answer for that. I think the market is generally moving towards more. I think visionary leaders understand that integration is necessary. But one of the things that we have done again through some of those workshops that we described was make space for all of these organizations to share concerns, share perspectives, share sort of engagement, which then builds sort of universal buy in. And what's really powerful is when your CX leaders start talking brand and your brand leaders start talking CX. And they realize that they cannot deliver their thing without each other. When that happens in an organization it's like such a magical unlock to see. But it's not easy.

Tom: The nice part about commitments based strategy and experience, strategy and commitments based brand strategy is that it should open both doors right? So when we do the commitments work, we're inviting brand leaders and experienced leaders in together. And now they have a new language of love. And this new language of love is a way that the very 1st title of this deck was brand. Strategists are from Venus and experience. Strategists are from Mars and they can bring their respective Venus and Mars points of view. But we can all agree that maximizing these commitments is the goal, whether we're looking at a broad-based CX. Or we're looking at building the brand, and actually both equal growth from a commercial perspective. So really nice sort of thing to think about as you are looking for. Perhaps people that you want to influence in the organization in terms of bridging gaps.

Cole: I wanna note that it is 12:03. We have a couple more comments. I don't know how many participants are still on, or if we should keep going.

Laura: You could take this last one, and then we'll wrap.

Cole: Okay. So, Tom, what happens when the brand narrative is flawless, but the physical or digital experience falls short which holds more power. The promise or the lived experience.

Tom: You're gonna put me on the spot for that one.

Cole: It's kind of a tee up for like a home run. I think.

Tom: Yeah, I mean, look, you're sort of I would love to know who asked that question reach out on Linkedin. So I can thank you. It's a bit of a layup, but I kind of feel like God put me on the planet to answer this question, because I can't say emphatically enough the experience has to match the message you absolutely. And again, we have all enjoyed wowing the executive table or creating a campaign and peanut buttering over whether or not we actually connected the dots. Those days are gone. They're gone. They're long gone and never to return because everything is going to become more AI driven, more connections, more matrix ideas of who you are and what you stand for at scale mapped to, how you're showing up in the world and the more that you show up in the world that is not in keeping with who you are and what you stand for, the further and further below surface. You are going to be pushed in terms of reference and search results. And as more AI systems become search driven right, not just the LLMs. And have kind of.

I would almost say, don't think of it as a search algorithm, but everything is going to have search to it in some way. That's a the agentification of brands, which is a whole other seminar. Come on by, we'll do it again. As that continues to happen, you will continually find, and you'll continually see, that the distance is going to get wider. Right? So you need to. You need to stop. Now, audit your experience, identify the moments in the experience that have the highest degree of likelihood proving that you are that who you say you are, and you need to execute them. Now stop the hygiene and execute them. Now make it 3. If you have to get those proof points out there, get your dealership mode, in the water, and then build around that all right. Well, if you stayed, I wish we had closing music, but we don't. But again I'm Tom, we love this stuff. We love all of you. Thanks for being here with us, and seek us out the next time we come on we'll talk more about AI and the role of AI and your content strategy, and getting a little bit more granular on the themes that we talked about here today.

Cole: Thanks so much y'all.

Tom: Thanks. Everyone.