The rules of a good benchmark

In my last article “7 steps to design an actionable customer journey”, I have promised to develop another article on my golden rules to set up a good benchmark. Why? Because too often in organisations, we have seen benchmarks that missed the point and didn’t reflect the reality of the market. The focus was either on details or on a very limited aspect of the brand experience and that was not delivering enough beef to solve the problems we were confronted to.

On the other side, when you decide to go in-depth, it could be very tempting to seek for exhaustiveness and to start comparing all aspects of each market players. But you may risk to drown yourself and others in details and miss an important opportunity to transfer your key learnings.

In any case, that would be a pity as a solid benchmark is still one of the best tool to update your team not only on your brand positioning but also on its market maturity. And if you want to stay tuned to your customers, this is also a great opportunity to explore, analyse and evaluate all different products, services and touch points they are confronted to anytime a new life event triggers a specific need that your company could potentially satisfy.

So, here are my personal rules when I start exploring one of our clients’ market. Let’s be straightforward, this is always a work in progress, so do not feel guilty if you don’t have time to go for multiple reworks. But I think that working on a good benchmark takes time, commitment and courage, especially if you want to update your audience with leading market trends and innovations.
 

1.     SET UP YOUR SCOPE AND KEY QUESTIONS

Before I start working, I always take time to prepare my exploration. It is like going for a trek or a trip in a faraway country. You need to prepare the itinerary or you risk to spend 2 days lost in an empty train station.

So, I start from the question: “What are we exploring?”

If I work on a customer journey, my interest won’t be raised by the same elements as if I need to revamp a product portfolio for example.

For a customer journey, the notion of time will be central. I will focus on the end-to-end itinerary to understand what is good and what is not. So, I need to know what are the main steps for the customer and the different available touch points. I also need to understand if some market players target specific segments and what are the value proposals they address customers with.

For a product portfolio design, I will explore the portfolios but also the details of the products. And I will compare and rank the features. So, I need performance indicators that I can apply to all products and players at the same time. I also need to understand the pricing models and how I could improve or revamp the portfolio.
 

2.     ENTER THE EXPERIENCE IN DEPTH AND EXPLORE ALL THE CHANNELS

Once I have listed all the channels and players that I will explore, I jump into my “customer’s shoes”. I visit the shops, websites, social media, I also gather some communication material, I eventually collect some offers and negotiate prices, I ask questions.

And I do it online too. I fill forms, I use simulation tools, I chat with the customer support, I even try to purchase a product or a service. Sometimes, I just try to find product information. It depends on the player’s digital experience quality.

But what is important is to go through the whole process as a real customer, with a real situation, seeking for specific information and actions to take. And if you have different profiles of customers to take into account, it can also be interesting to repeat the exercise to evaluate different behaviours, in different contexts, with various objectives.

Whatever the scope, at this stage, I mostly take pictures and screenshots of all relevant elements observed during the experience and I list my observations in comparison tables.
 

3.     SEARCH FOR INNOVATION IN THE SECTOR

After this stage, I will do an analysis of the different tables I built with indicators to understand which players are addressing which targets and what are the key elements of their experience (or products) that stand out but also relate to the targets.

In general, this is the moment to point out innovations and to estimate their level of adoption on the market. In other words, this is when you realise how pressing it is to invest or not -depending on your strategy and positioning - into some specific features.

If you want to prepare a first presentation at this level, you can already integrate your comparison tables with highlights and call-outs and illustrate those with print screens and pictures, by player or by key element.
 

4.     COMPARE PROBLEMS TO SOLVE TO OTHER MARKETS

Now that you have an idea of what is the performance of your product or experience, you can already identify some problems to solve.

If your main issue is, for example, that you are the last of your market with anecdotic social media presences, you can start exploring other markets to understand what involved customers are engaging with.  That will provide you with insights to build your content strategy later.

In another context, if the problem is your product being a commodity, you might find interesting trends in other commodity markets, with ideas to create added-value, using digital tools, new products or servicing or simply going the extra mile in your human interactions with customers.

Whatever the angle, do not hesitate to search for published results from the company you consider to be at par with. Those will provide you with reinsurance regarding the effectiveness of their approach and you can also use them to feed your presentation.
 

5.     STRUCTURE YOUR BENCHMARK

When you present a benchmark, you will create more impact by putting your key observations and learnings in perspective with specific business objectives. This step is thus closely connected to my first step of “setting key questions”.

Why are you making this benchmark? What are the context and expectations? What did you do and what did you observe? Is this exercise related to a regular market monitoring or oriented by a certain project? 

In any case, the purpose of your presentation is to share with your team what are the business objectives you could achieve by optimising your brand assets. So, what are those assets, how are they ranked today and how could you improve them adopting best practices observed in your benchmark?

Interested to exchange about your market position and hear our view, feel free to get in touch :-)

About the author

Amélie has been active in the digital strategy field since the last 12 years and during that period has consulted for a wide array of sectors: Beauty, insurances, transport, banks, energy, automotive, FMCG, Telco, Food retail, NGOs... she uses the diversity the challenges and solutions she examined to  think cross-industry and doesn't hesitate to apply best practices and solutions from one industry to another.

During the same period she has extended her experience and capabilities applies her digital thinking to marketing strategy, product portfolio design and has become one of Belgium's key strategists in terms of omni-channel customer experience design. 

Interested to meet Amélie, feel free to contact her here