Frictionless vs. Memorable
Which one of these two strategies is better?
What kind of customer experience are you offering?
Are you offering your customers a once-in-a-lifetime shopping experience that they will endlessly talk about with their friends; or are you making sure that their shopping experience is completely free from hassle and bother?
Which one of these two strategies is better?
According to some new research - there are three important things to take note of here:
'First, we found a positive correlation between both frictionless and memorable experiences and consumers’ sentiment and spending behavior. Second, we found that those relationships varied by industry. Neither of these findings are that surprising.'
'The third finding, however, is: At a certain point, there are zero-sum gains when pursuing both frictionless and memorable experiences as a competitive strategy. Brands can only grow so much by pursuing a joint strategy of being both frictionless and memorable. To grow beyond that point, brands must choose to focus on one or the other–to be either increasingly frictionless or increasingly memorable.' - via
What's also eye-opening for us is that as a brand achieves more and more market share, it makes more sense for that brand to pursue a strategy of a frictionless customer experience than to try and be memorable in the customer's opinion. Only rarely can brands with high market share effectively deliver a memorable customer experience.
As you would expect - a neat 2x2 matrix allows any brand to plot its positioning in relation to its competitors.
The take out here is that as a brand grows bigger, strategically it doesn't make sense to try and be all things to all people.
In your journey to delight customers, at a certain point on the journey it's best to follow your brand principles and deliver on the one customer experience area that makes sense for you and your customers.
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Luke Williams,