In honor of International Women’s Day, here are some thoughts on how brands can engage women consumers, who still command outsize purchase influence across many product and service sectors. 

Brands, take heed:

#1: Differentiate your brand through unique experiences for female consumers.

Why? Because women are even more influenced by unique brand experiences than the general population. Research shows they’re more likely than men to say that a unique experience is very important in determining brand choice. They’re also more likely to say they would pay more for a product if it was associated with a unique brand experience. Check out our Best Experience Brands consumer study to learn more.

#2: Stand for something.

Women are more likely to say they want brands to do “something special” to get their attention. They are also more likely to say they’ll specifically choose brands (price and quality aside) that are connected to a cause they believe in—say, the environment, or healthy eating, or women’s health. This is hard to fake but really important

#3: Give women something to talk about.

Women are significantly more likely than men to be influenced by word of mouth referrals and recommendations, according to our research. They are also far more likely to say “I only advocate brands when I have had great personal experiences with them.” For more, download our 2012 New Realities research.

Yes, women are the minority when it comes to leadership positions, even in women-heavy industries like advertising and marketing (working on it!), but we still control an outsize share of consumer spending power and influence.

Brands, we want experiences.

A stand-out stat from our Best Experience Brands study released last week is the number of consumers (78%) who say they’d pay more for a product or service if they knew they’d have a unique experience with that brand.

Think about it: in the midst of what people keep telling us is the worst recession in forever, 78% of consumers would pay more for a better experience. It doesn’t make sense.

And yet it makes total sense. Imagine consumers adrift in a sea of sameness, struggling to distinguish among competing products and discern relevant content from the thousands of media messages they’re exposed to on a daily basis. The promise of a unique experience with a brand immediately shifts the dynamic—from push to pull, from brand to user, from talking about providing value to actually doing so. Of course consumers are willing to pay more for that!

Holidays mean holiday travel, which means many more (expensive) reminders of how the whole airline experience is in need of a redesign. Based on my recent holiday flights on a US-based airline that will go unnnamed, here are some touchpoints I’d suggest could be improved:

• Data transparency:
  Google can show me my backyard from a satellite, but airlines are strangely unwilling to provide real-time info about flights, seats and timing. When 2 out of 3 planes on this trip were delayed due to mechanical issues, I discovered that the airline’s mobile app looked cool but told me little.
• Random acts of green:
  Given massive fuel consumption any airline that branded itself sustainable would quickly earn a rep for greenwashing, but that shouldn’t discourage a bold airline brand from fixing what they can: no more styrofoam cups bearing bad coffee, no more single-use plastic cups, maybe even some better-quality organic and fair-trade snacks and meals (I’d pay more for them).   
• Human touch:
  Based on our Best Experience Brands study, which includes consumer perspectives on the airline experience, people are positive about easy and efficient digitally-driven touchpoints (like online ticket buying and electronic kiosk check-in) and severely critical about customer service (whether by phone, in person or in flight) that doesn’t meet expectations.     
• Style:
  People of a certain age can be positively nostalgic about how cool air travel used to be (the show Pan Am might feed that nostalgia). Even in the severely price-driven atmosphere of airlines, bringing a bit of style back would go a long way to improving the overall experience. As a colleague points out, a bit of humor would also be great—like entertainment as I wait at baggage claim, or a unique take on the safety briefing at takeoff.

Last week Malcolm Gladwell published an article in The New Yorker titled “The Tweaker: Steve Jobs’s Real Genius.”  In addition to offering an excuse to the time-strapped not to read Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography, it got me thinking about the extent to which “tweaking” is in fact one of the magical arts of great experience brands.

In Gladwell’s account, perfectionism and obsessive editorializing even more than creativity drove Jobs’s genius: he observed, he improved, he improved some more.

That’s something experience brands also do well—and yes, Jobs’s Apple is rated by consumers the greatest experience brand of them all in our forthcoming Best Experience Brands study. Experience designers observe touchpoints and obsessively improve them, adding in new touchpoints as needed. Whether they’re assessing touchpoints online or off, they look at them through a user lens, constantly reiterating to make experiences flow better, be faster and more intuitive, and ultimately be more inspiring. 

So, tweak away experience brand masters!

I really enjoyed Kingshuk Das’s recent article in Fast Company’s design blog about how some of today’s most successful companies “change the script”. 

It’s very evocative of Seth Godin’s well-known “purple cow”—and of what we mean when we talk about “experience brands”. Those are brands which invest in the experiences they deliver, differentiating on the basis of how unique or uniquely well-executed those experiences are.

We’ll soon release our first Best Experience Brands study, which among other things isolates some of the drivers of unique brand experiences. In addition to great products, these drivers include many examples of “changing the script,” such as: “Understands my needs”;  “Continues to serve and engage me after I’ve become a customer”;  “Exceeds my expectations”.

“In the mundane routine of our lives,” says Das, “experiences that stand out are often those that change the existing scripts.” Consumers surveyed for our Best Experience Brands study agree. Watch this space for the study, to be released 30 November.

With almost two months to go in 2011 it’s a bit premature to be calling the year, but at the risk of being premature, here are 3 brand lessons that stick out for me:

#1: The best brands are experience brands. 

Jack Morton is about to release our first “Best Experience Brands” study (email me to learn more). We learned that consumers really do prefer brands that offer unique experiences. When we asked what brands they think are experience brands, Apple was by far the top choice—as I said, the best brands are experience brands.

#2: Brands that deliver an inconsistent experience will suffer. 

Netflix: the problem wasn’t that the experience was bad so much as that the experience Netflix customers were promised wasn’t the one they got. 

#3: Standing for something is part of experience.

Starbucks will never win over my foodie friends, but it remains a brand that outperforms competitors based on providing a superior experience—and increasingly, that experience has included taking a stand, sometimes on touchy matters like political contributions and gridlock. My favorite: Create Jobs for USA, developed by GOOD Projects. 

I’m not one to pile on, so this will not be yet another Netflix screed. The chorus of people saying “Netflix can’t do anything right” is already big enough (just a bit bigger than the one that used to say they couldn’t do anything wrong).

Netflix still has a lot going for it as a brand and as a business. That’s not to underestimate the challenges, for example, matching the quality of available on-demand content with that of its DVD business. But even after the well-known errors of recent months—to which CEO Reed Hastings owned up in a New York Times Magazine interview—there’s a lot build on:  

#1: It’s an experience brand

Netflix is at heart an experience brand: what was great before it wasn’t was how carefully they seemed to have thought through the ways people interact with and consume their service, and how consistently they extended and innovated their experience. Every touchpoint felt like it delivered on a core brand promise. I’d argue that Netflix has a really strong platform to build from, and that by applying more disciplined experience brand thinking, they’ll recover their momentum.  

#2: People feel passionately about the brand

Remember when you got to watch every episode of West Wing season 2 just when you wanted because of your Netflix subscription? Or when your son hooked up your Wii so you could watch Netflix on demand and your life was changed forever? I do. I also know my colleague Leesa is very proud of having been a Netflix subscriber from the beginning. Even after 800,000 people canceled their subscriptions, Netflix still has 23 million subscribers—and most of them, I’d argue, want it to be successful. As a company, Netflix doesn’t seem too interested in traditional marketing, but I’d recommend some nontraditional investment in their creating experiences to show their customers some love. It could tap into the passion people feel for the brand and fix some of the bad optics of their regrettable emails of late.

#3: Even weakened, Netflix still offers a better experience than the competition

The stock is declining even as I write. It’s lost two thirds of its value in three months. But really people, show me a better experience.