The marriage of logistics and your brand strategy

Brand: it’s a term I believe we should treat with great care. Marketers often talk about creating a brand image, building a brand name, generating brand awareness – in reality, your ‘brand’ is an incredibly valuable business asset.

What is perhaps most important is what brand means to the customer. Your brand is your reputation – the reason people put their trust in us and invest precious resource with us.

So, why does this matter in logistics? Because the customer’s experience is what truly makes or breaks a brand.

Deliver a good service and your reputation is upheld. Deliver a great service beyond expectations with tangible value for the customer and it becomes far stronger – it becomes competitive advantage. Get it wrong, and your hard work can come undone quickly.

In a world with so much competition, without exceptional service a brand can be nothing more than a smart logo or a slick-designed website – in other words, a façade that doesn’t do your services and products justice.

In order to deliver great service however, we must first understand exactly what that means to the customer and find the value that we can add. Taking a few examples of the customers of some of our clients – exceptional service and value is ensuring an engineer can fix critical medical machinery on their first visit. For another, it’s the tracking and delivery of multiple items, small, large, hazardous, in one easy consignment, arriving before the business day begins. And another, it’s branded protective packaging with a personalised note and a speedy, simplified returns process.

We should all seek to delight our clients and customers every chance we get – each single touch point, from the moment your customer chooses to purchase from you to a consignment arriving, is an opportunity (not forgetting reverse / inbound / returns, which is an often-overlooked opportunity to build a solid reputation).

We take all our clients through a Diagnosis process before Design and Implementation and more than ever, we hear about logistics being at the heart of their business strategy and the customer proposition.

The way businesses view logistics is rapidly changing – today the true focus of logistics is driving value throughout the chain to uphold, protect, grow and distinguish our brands.

If you would like to find out if our approach to personalised logistics could help you add value for your customers, we’d love to hear from you. Call us on 01795 413 602 or email info@carousel.eu.