Third Party Brand Danger Zones

Chapter 2, Part 4 - Corporate Brand Personality

With the increase in outsourcing of certain departments such as the whole supply-chain, customer support, and third party sales agents, there is a greater potential for your company brand values to be severely diluted. The task of trying to align sub-contracted employees to your brand is a tough one. First, I would ask if you are measuring the impact of sub-contractor staff behaviours on your customers and are you even sure you are getting accurate feedback?? Sometimes customers just move away to another supplier, and you never know why or were never aware there was a potential problem in the first place. In fact, more customers will move to an alternative supplier because of indifference experienced from their current supplier, not necessarily from bad service.? One unfortunate customer experience offers a supplier a great opportunity to truly demonstrate their corporate brand values and to prove that one situation might have just been a blip rather than the norm. How a negative situation is dealt with can very often turn out to be a fabulous opportunity to regain the loyalty of those customers.

YOU NEVER QUITE KNOW WHEN YOUR BRAND IS ON SHOW

I recall one partiular experience while at an exhibition. We were hosting a booth for our training company and opposite was the booth of a well-known insurance group. The female representative on the booth was not presented in a way that I would have expected from this particular company. She also looked bored, was indifferent to people walking past, didn’t engage in conversation with them and was generally the opposite of what I would have expected.? In a quiet moment I went over to speak to her. During our conversation, she told me that she didn’t actually work for the company she was representing on the booth; she worked for an agency. I couldn’t help wondering what sort of checks were in place by this insurance company as to the staff being used to portray their brand in such a public way.? In fact, I did write a constructive letter to the managing director to mention that he might want to be aware of this potential brand dilution, and received a reply to say they were perfectly happy with their contractor and the way their brand was being projected by them.

?On the other hand, when living in the United Kingdom, every week we would use our regular grocery home delivery service for our favourite supermarket, 特易购公司 . Every week it was a different delivery driver, but each one of them was consistently cheerful, (whatever the weather), helpful, chatty and above all had a great authentic personal brand. Tesco employ their own ‘customer delivery assistants’ rather than sub-contract to another company, so they can lead and develop the way they behave much more effectively.? I interviewed Mark Chapman, Tesco’s customer fulfilment centre’s director to find out how they achieve this level of consistency.?

First, Mark told me that he has a vision of a ‘great place to work, and iconic service” in the Tesco fulfilment operation. They don’t just pay lip-service to this vision with the customer delivery team, they work exceptionally hard to ensure that each and every driver feels this in their everyday experiences working at Tesco. For example, they give them a great fulfilment centre environment to work from, with personal lockers, good food and a high-quality uniform. The group leader’s first response to requests for leave is always ‘yes’, even if it’s going to take some working through to make it possible. In short, they treat their drivers well and demonstrate at each opportunity that they value them. What they demand in return is that the drivers look after their customers exceptionally well. Of course, this has a tendency to happen organically as they are looked after so well as employees.

Tesco ask their drivers to bring their personality to work – they want them to be authentic and project their personal brands. This certainly comes across, as you will know if you’ve ever experienced Tesco grocery home deliveries.? Overall, a great business model, that seems to work incredibly well. Of course, this type of culture is more difficult to achieve across an entire organisation. However, it is possible if we can empower all employees to be authentic and be the best they can be, starting with creating an environment that inspires, nurtures and provides for this.

Some supermarket chains and other retail outlets use sub-contractors for their delivery service of course. A recent experience with a clothing manufacturer, demonstrated for me how badly wrong this can go. They consistently failed to deliver the product ordered and did not communicate, so that in the end I gave up and cancelled the order. My desire to buy from this particular brand again is zero.

This is nothing to do with the service from the company themselves or the product, but purely down to their third-party delivery service.? I don’t need to state which piece of the experience will be remembered and talked about.? I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences. What a dilution and waste of brand investment. In fact, in this particular case, when I did speak to management to explain the situation, I was told they were well aware of the issues with the third-party courier service but had been told they could do nothing about it. How bizarre that a company that spends millions of pounds on their marketing and branding, would be so relaxed about the most relevant customer touch-point in their business – that of the physical interaction between them and their customer, at their own home.

Case Study

A few years ago, one of our clients was a company called Water for Work and Home (now part of WATER WELLBEING LIMITED ) – a medium-sized business in the south of England. Their business provides delivery of water to homes and offices around the UK. They recognized early on in our discussions about a company-wide focus on the people element of the brand, that their delivery drivers or their Water Men as they call them, were quite simply the most important people in their business. They represented the most valuable customer touchpoint for them. As such we put together a specific and tailored programme for this group of people, that focused on them as brand ambassadors and made them feel valued as the focal part of the business, rather than ‘just the van drivers’.? The management team recognized early on that their brand could be seriously enhanced or indeed damaged by this group of people alone. They are very particular about who they recruit into these important roles and with our programme gave them the training they needed in areas of their brand that included conversational skills, dress & appearance and self-awareness as brand ambassadors.??

They are now one of the United Kingdom’s largest and most successful independent suppliers of water coolers and bottled water, and it all started as a small family-run business back in 1992.? Their website talks about Water Men on the home page and says ‘Our Water Men are at the very heart of our business. In fact, they're our eyes and ears too!’ What a mantra to have.

At the other end of the corporate scale, we had an exceptional demonstration of corporate values from a CEO/Founder himself. I won’t mention the name of the company here in this book at the CEO’s request; however, I regularly mention this story to friends and colleagues and recommend the company as a result of what happened to me.

This company states on their website that they are ‘Trusted all over the World’. A strong brand statement to make and live up to.? They had messed up part of their service that I had booked with them, and the potential consequences were looking a little dire. I posted a comment on Twitter (now X) in a desperate attempt to get a solution to the problem. At that point the CEO himself picked this up and realized that he was in a position to help us, and he did. The problem was solved in less than 30 minutes. This situation went from one of never using them again and writing about it, to complete trust that even though they made a mistake (and of course it happens), they live and breathe their values and will handle any situation appropriately for the client. I’m now of course a total champion of their company and brand. If we ever meet, ask me who they are and I’ll tell you! It’ll also prove that you read my book!

If the CEO is setting the example, there is a better chance that the rest of the leadership team, line managers and every employee will ‘get’ the culture and what is expected of them. It then becomes a situation of, ‘that’s the way things are done around here’, and a standard is set.?

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