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Here are some important terms of art when it comes to understanding the strength of your brand:
Brand Awareness – the visibility of your brand and it’s products/services in the eyes of consumers.
Branding Campaigns – tactical strategies for driving brand awareness.
Impressions – how many customers actually lay eyes on elements of your branding campaign.
Now here is where it gets tricky…
Customer Engagement – some define customer engagement as a reaction of a customer to your brand. For example, an online measure of engaging a customer is typically CTR (clickthrough rate). If your paid search campaign has 5,000 impressions and 100 people click the ad link, your clickthrough rate of 100/5,000 (2%) would be a metric of online customer engagement.
Others define customer engagement as a measure of the emotional connection between a customer and a brand. Such metrics should predict a customer’s likelihood to repurchase, to remain loyal, and to even advocate for your brand. This type of engagement can be tracked with metrics like the Net Promoter Score or a Gallup tool like the CE-3 (customer engagement 3).
You can find more information on emotional engagement metrics in my books The New Gold Standard and Driven to Delight as well as in a variety of online resources .
But for the purpose of this blog let me introduce what I think might be the strongest (albeit a rather informal metric of customer engagement) — the tattoo!
For years now, I have watched and written about employees and customers who have inked their bodies with the logos of brands to whom they are emotionally (and eternally) engaged. Based on my observation, more popular tattooed brands include Starbucks, Harley-Davidson, Apple, and Nike.
What says brand engagement more than having yourself branded in ink?
That leads me to the Australian restaurant Cafe 51 and their burgers for life campaign. The campaign is integrated with #freeburgersforlife.
According to the Cafe 51 website, “Tattoos are for life, so why shouldn’t burgers be free for life too, right?… It’s simple, pick a burger, any burger from our current menu and get it tattooed anywhere on your body.”
The details of the campaign go on to outline that the tattoo must be life-sized, participants must be over 18, and there is a limit of one tattoo per customer.
To redeem the offer you must show your tattoo to Cafe 51 staff upon request to get a burger a day for life.
So here are some questions for you. How are you measuring customer engagement (from brand consideration to customer advocacy)? If you offered your products or services for life would your customers be willing to get tattooed with your brand? How about, if that tattoo, had to be visible at all times?
While loyalty and advocacy aren’t tattooed on our customers, they are durable reflections of the experiences we deliver! Through outstanding experience delivery, engaged customers spread the word about our brand and even help drive down the cost-per-click when we enlist branding or product campaigns!