• by Fred Geyer , Chiaki Nishino , July 11, 2011

Breakthrough. All marketers strive to make their offerings stand out, be noticed and gain traction. Few achieve their goals -- categories are competitive, media is cluttered, budgets are limited and customers are moving too fast to notice.

In pursuit of breakthrough, many marketers repeat worn-out methods or fall prey to the latest digital fad. Many believe breakthrough can only be achieved through big advertising budgets or put blind faith in the power of innovation to sell itself.

A savvy few, however, have put their efforts into signature touchpoints -- with resounding success. Creating them helped Electrolux vault from a miniscule market share to owning a third of the North American premium kitchen appliance market in less than a year and despite the recession.

It was important for Electrolux to reconfigure European products for the U.S., and fashion a compelling message. But what made the difference was finding new ways to engage customers in the showroom, on the web and among kitchen designers, all critical to kitchen remodelers. In creating signature touchpoints around those interaction points, Electrolux's team created traveling designer showcases featuring spokeswoman Kelly Ripa, redesigned the in-store environment, and built a highly engaging web experience.

Signature touchpoints are a bundle of related points of customer interaction that have been redesigned to improve the customer experience and foster a unique, proprietary customer connection. They engage, motivate and, importantly, provide a platform for products and services to bypass customer filters and competitive noise to breakthrough.

Imagine 3M without its successful top-to-top executive relationships with the leaders at its customers' customers. Would Apple be as successful without the Apple store to entice customers to play with its products? Where would IBM be had it not turned consulting touchpoints into a competitive advantage?

Transforming important aspects of the customer experience into signature touchpoints takes just as much rigor and inspiration as new product development or building a communication campaign. Creating them relies on insights into how customers gather and filter buying information and requires innovative approaches to engaging customers along their path to purchase.

Here are the steps to build signature touchpoints:

1. Map the path to purchase:
The path to purchase varies based on category and the purchase occasion. A routine copy paper purchase follows a fast, price-driven path. It takes a far more considered path to source a high-tech material for a novel manufacturing application.

Successfully mapping the path takes understanding the role of influencers, barriers blocking a customer's movement along the path, and the places on the path that are critical to customers' decision making. Hill's Pet Nutrition, for example, a global leader in premium nutritional foods for dogs and cats, has created an array of signature touchpoints with veterinarians. These include the nutrition education that the company provides at no cost to veterinarians. It lets them fulfill their post-graduate learning requirements while building their understanding of emerging pet nutrition issues such as obesity or joint disease.

2. Develop innovative connection ideas
It takes a systematic and inspired innovation process to develop signature touchpoints, focusing on ways to transform, replace, enhance or extend existing interaction points. Co-creation is one effective way to create innovative signature touchpoints by engaging cross-functional teams to re-examine customer decision-making and generate customer connection ideas. Zurich's HelpPoint resulted from co-creation. This innovative signature touchpoint simplifies information gathering for customers evaluating insurance. The one-stop resource meets all their insurance planning needs, helping them at steps in their path to purchase when they are most confused.

3. Build integrated plans
Finally, signature touchpoints need to be integrated with products and messaging so they become a platform for products that break through the clutter and bypass customer filters. Integrated plans must be concrete, well sequenced, and include concrete progress measures. Integrated planning always appears simple on paper but drafting plans that are inspired and actionable is difficult.

Three simple practices can help. First, keep it short. Concise plans force the organization to concentrate on doing a few things well, they key to effective execution. Second, build a balanced scorecard early in the planning process that includes metrics of product satisfaction, message penetration, and customer connection. When metrics are decided early in the plan, they help ensure that the entire team is aligned on achieving results not just on activities. Third, focus on customer behavior. For every investment, ask two questions: What do we want customers to do? How will this investment help them do it?

Signature touchpoints are not new. Macy's in its heyday created the Thanksgiving Day Parade to kick off the Christmas buying season. Hallmark supported elevating Mother's Day into a card-giving occasion.

What is new is a proven approach to building them. Consider signature touchpoints the third dimension of marketing -- the crucial, and often overlooked, component in achieving breakthrough in the escalating battle for customer engagement.