Emotional attachment vs customer experience

Does emotional attachment to a brand prevail over the online customer experience for Internet-based companies?

The golden age of the Web2.0 has seen an increasing number of customers complaining about bad online customer experiences. The online world is flawed with poorly designed websites delivering sought services in an undesirable fashion. But does that really put off customers provided that they get quality in what they pay for? What is it that we like so much about these Internet brands that don’t provide a good customer experience?

Let’s have a look at Amazon and Ryanair: frankly these sites will never figure on the hall of fame for the most smartly designed website. Amazon has a cluttered and messy layout all the way, whereas Ryanair looks cheap and is often mischievous in terms of pricing as the final price of a flight ticket rarely matches what’s advertised on the homepage.

But does that make customers stop consuming? Well not really, at least for the majority of them. And the reason is simple and well known in the marketing industry: most of the users are emotionally bonded to brands, even more when they are outstanding in some way. The Amazon site is a jungle (easy pun!) but it is also renowned worldwide for being the most popular and number one goods reseller website. The Ryanair site might be deceiving in terms of its flight fares, but it nonetheless remains one of the cheapest air carrier to fly with across Europe.

I think we all agree that “what it costs to us” is a key decision-making element when purchasing something. More generally, what matters is the end result and the quality we get for what we pay for. But is that enough to be used as an excuse for not delivering a good customer experience?

From a customer standpoint, it obviously isn’t enough as quality is expected throughout the process. From a brand perspective, the philosophy might be different. Executives may think that cheap experience is inline with the cheapness of the prices in place, or that money and effort not spent on the platform is spent on the quality of the actual service.

Whatever reason it is, those companies offering a poor online experience are playing with fire. Internet being generally their sole selling channel, they can hardly rely on other media to communicate their image and emotionally tie consumers. Should transactional processes, for example, be affected by design or conceptual shortcomings, customers could easily decide to move to new pastures. This is all the more valid in the current financial climate where comparison websites are flourishing, the competition (in prices and ideas) is becoming fiercer and customers are becoming increasingly demanding.

In conclusion, the emotional attachment to a brand plays a tremendous role in the overall brand experience, hence the emergence of new measurement techniques to assess emotional engagement such as the Emotional Engagement Measurement™ (EEM ™). However, I believe that companies only relying on brand perception might be digging their own grave by neglecting their customer experience.