Before we can turn your customers into obsessive fans of your brand, we need to get inside their heads to learn their interests, goals, dreams, pet peeves, frustrations, what gets them out of bed in the morning, and what keeps them awake at night. Demographics are useful, but actually meeting your customers, and getting to know them, is the key to Brand Addiction.

We'll ask you to prioritize your most important constituencies - the customers who generate the greatest lifetime value, for instance, or the customers who are most likely to defect to a competing brand. We'll agree on the behavior we hope to stimulate. Then, based on secondary research and interviews with your managers, staff, and customers, we'll identify the needs that must be met and the issues or concerns that must be overcome in order to drive the desired habitual behavior.

Armed with intimate knowledge of your customer, we can start generating compelling ideas for brand experiences your customers will crave.

If your site makes it even slightly difficult for customers to learn more about you or buy from you, every penny you spend to generate site traffic hurts your business instead of helping it. You're attracting people only to make them feel frustrated and unwelcome.

Our Experience Audits are designed to ensure that your entire site experience is so effortless and enjoyable that it stimulates habitual visits from your customers and prospects.

First, we'll conduct an Audience Needs Analysis to gain an understanding about the things your most important customers need most from your site. Then, we'll look into every nook and cranny of your site and evaluate your customer experience against those needs. We'll also evaluate your site against 280 best practices that have been established by powerhouses such as Amazon, eBay, AOL, and other online leaders (including us). We'll tell you exactly where your site meets customer needs, and where you're missing the mark.

One of the best ways to prioritize your website development efforts is to know how far behind or ahead of your competitors you are.

Once we've completed an Audience Needs Analysis and have a handle on what your customers need most from a brand like yours, we'll comb through your competitor's sites to see how well they're meeting the most important needs of your most important customers. We'll compare the results of this audit with the results from your Customer Experience Audit, and write a report that details where you're ahead of the competition, and where you're behind.

Then we'll also develop a prioritized list of what you need to do to create a superior site experience. For instance, if you've already got the best shopping cart experience in your industry, you probably don't need to spend time or money to make it better. On the other hand, if your video capability is far behind your nearest competitor, and if the ability to create, watch, or share videos is highly important to your customers, you'll want to devote time and resources to that area. We'll tie all this together into a nice, neat, concise presentation that will tell you how distance yourself from your competitors and get your customers coming back to you again and again.

In those cases where we've done an Audience Needs Analysis, An Experience Audit, and a Competitive Audit, we get a pretty strong view about your overall brand experience and the ways in which your brand attracts customers. From that point it becomes a simple matter to analyze your brand, and figure out the essential elements of your successful brand experience.

Using this analysis you can evaluate any aspect of your brand experience, from your website, to your office offline advertising, to your collateral materials. By making sure every experience contains the essential elements, you'll ensure that your brand continues to attract the kinds of people who are most likely to become loyal customers.