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Brand Sanity
Maybe it's a little less sexy than the current facination with brand co-creation, but I like the customer focus shown in our 1to1 Weekly story this week. Credit Suisse and American Express may not have a lot of MySpace friends or YouTube videos, but their branding speaks to customers in a language that all the stakeholders undertsand. "One Bank" shows a brand promise and a higher customer goal for Credit Suisse. Involving employees from the top to the bottom at Amex is a quiet but effective way of ensuring that the brand gets communicated and reinforced in every transactions. It's not brands screaming for attention. It's a little bit of welcome sanity.
John
It is a mistake to think that companies and their employees alone can deliver the "brand". Brands are not the stuff that marketers and their agencies dream of, but the stuff that customers live and talk about. If marketing think the brand is a peach, but customers think it is a lemon. It is a lemon. Period.
If your expensively reengineered brand doesn't deliver what customers want to think and feel about it. It is a lemon. Period.
Companies can only create real brands when they team up with customers to understand what they really mean to them. And then organise with customers to deliver what they expect. Maybe occasionally even to delight them.
Without this sort of basic co-creation (not the MySpace fluff), brands run the risk of being irrelevant at best, or expensive and ultimately futile lies at worst.
Graham Hill
By my count, it's a very rare case when front office staff catch up with the brand and translate that right to the customer, and it seems the top marketing guy from AmEx agrees with that. The main thing is that these people don't have any significant stimulus to do it because there is no such a metric in nature (at least, I never heard about it) that would enforce them to make such a connection. Aside from it, brands and mission statements may be quite abstract at times to have something tangible on hands to communicate to customers.
So, to reach the stars, the question should be turned upside down. What you need isn't to connect the brand and the customer, but the metric (e.g. "the brand perception index") and the corporate front runner. The promise of the award will get people into the game to amalgamate the brand with their service effort. If done properly in a top-down fashion, the end product would be exactly "a connection the customer with the brand".