The Three Moments of Truth in Branding

Moments of truth are based on interactions with your product or brand that either make or break the customer experience. 

An ironclad brand strategy brings to life your brand throughout the customer journey, making that journey rewarding for your customer and for your business.

While I was in brand management at Clorox, CEO Don Knauss often encouraged us to think about how we can use our brand throughout the customer journey, or throughout what he called the “three moments of truth.” Those three moments are desire, decide, and delight.

1) DESIRE: Create desire for what we offer

The first moment of truth, DESIRE, is the set of activities where we make our prospective customer aware of us and consider us and come to like us. We do that by leaning into our brand promise.

2) DECIDE: Motivate customers to decide to purchase it

The second moment of truth, DECIDE, is the marketing activities that make it frictionless for somebody who is considering buying our offering to say yes to our offering. We make it easy for them to find and purchase our offering, whether this is a purchase over the internet, a retail store, or a person-to-person interaction. We make it easy for them, and that makes it more likely that at this moment of truth they’re going to continue in their relationship with us.

3) DELIGHT: Cultivate delight from experiencing our offering

The third moment of truth, DELIGHT, is the set of activities that makes our customers glad that they said “Yes.” We do this through the product experience, the whole product experience, including the obvious part of the product as well as the things that we do that wrap around it, like customer service and communications.

Delight is how you ignite loyalty and love from these customers.

Do you give plenty of attention to customers at each of these three moments of truth?

REMEMBER:

Use all of the moments of truth to deepen your relationship with your customers. They will be more likely to see you, buy you, and love you as a result.