Because eventually someone actually has to deal with you.
There’s a comforting idea in marketing that almost any business problem can be solved with more marketing.
Sales slowing down?
Advertise.
Competitor getting noisy?
Advertise.
Customers unhappy?
Advertise harder.
Unfortunately, there comes a point where another campaign is rather like putting a fresh coat of paint on a car while the engine is on fire. It may look better, but people will eventually notice the smoke.
Advertising Makes Promises. Experience Provides the Evidence.
Imagine an advert telling you a company offers exceptional customer service.
Beautiful photography. Polished copy. Possibly a slow-motion shot of someone smiling thoughtfully at a laptop.
Then you become a customer.
Nobody answers your email.
You call.
“Your call is important to us.”
Twenty-seven minutes later, having developed a close personal relationship with the hold music, you begin to suspect this statement may lack supporting evidence.
That’s the problem.
Marketing tells people what to expect. Customer experience tells them whether you were telling the truth.
And customers have become remarkably good at comparing the two. Reviews, recommendations and social media mean the experience can quickly become part of your public reputation.
The Customer Always Meets the Real Business
Marketing teams can create wonderful brands.
Friendly, responsive, human, easy to deal with, but customers don’t experience the brand strategy.
They experience the receptionist.
The salesperson.
The delivery.
The invoice.
The engineer.
The returns process.
The email nobody replied to.
Internally, these things belong to different departments.
Customers couldn’t care less. They experience one business.
So if your marketing says “We’re incredibly easy to deal with”. At the same time, your contact form requires seventeen mandatory fields and the approximate maiden name of your first goldfish, customers tend to believe the form.
More Advertising Can Actually Make Things Worse
Here’s the really awkward bit. If your customer experience is poor, increasing your marketing may introduce more people to the problem.
Congratulations.
You’ve successfully scaled disappointment.
The better approach might be to spend less time asking: “How do we attract more customers?”
And slightly more time asking: “What happens when they get here?”
Where’s the friction?
What annoys people?
Where are expectations being broken?
What small change would make dealing with you noticeably easier?
Because sometimes the most effective marketing improvement has absolutely nothing to do with marketing.
Customer Experience Is the New Advertising
That’s the theme behind Episode 14 of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing: Customer Experience Is the New Advertising.
I explore why marketing increasingly acts as the opening statement. At the same time, customer experience provides proof: a helpful employee, a smooth process, or a brilliantly handled problem can generate more loyalty and advocacy than another expensive campaign.
Fix the Experience Before Increasing the Volume
Advertising still works.
Good marketing still matters enormously, but it can only make a promise.
Eventually, somebody has to deliver it.
So before increasing the advertising budget, look at what happens after someone clicks, calls, or buys.
Because you can create the cleverest campaign in the world.
You can polish the brand.
You can optimise the funnel.
You can even announce that you’re passionate about customer-centric excellence, if you absolutely must.
But you can’t advertise your way out of a bad customer experience.
Eventually, the experience becomes the advertising.
