Who is undoing your brand? Is it you or your people? Both?

Their vision and mission statements look like The Hippocratic Oath. Customer experience, customer delight, customer engagement, customer centricity, customer care etc are terms used with gay abandon. Posters articulating the brand story adorn the corporate walls. These are all nice to have vocabulary but with no intent to walk the talk, the delta between the cup and the lip is an ocean. You are most certainly in choppy waters.

It cannot be even called the flavour of the season. Well, that is supposed to be seasonal. When billboards scream at you 13 months in a year with the ubiquitous 25 to 70% off discount. In so doing, what you are wielding the megaphone on is that your brand is NOT worth a special trip and the only way customers can be pulled in is by perennial bribing and apparently deep discounting.

?

(If numerology and how it got into marketing interests you, I can direct you to an earlier blog of mine here ).

You are a brand of artisanal chocolates. Hand made and imported from Belgium. Heart crafted for flavour, delight and an ethereal experience. Lot of love and emotional labour goes into making a brand of this nature and stature. That is desired, cherished, gifted, spoken about. And then you melt it all away by plastering your storefront with (terribly designed) SALE stickers.

You have build a hotel unlike any other. Sorry, it can’t be called a hotel. It is a destination meant to wow. The designers, the builders, the owners put their money where their mouth and stuck their neck out for offering elevated privileges and a never before experience. And then what happens- your front desk receptionist decides to pick up customer calls only after her nail paint has dried.

?

Your online banking is an uphill struggle. Your brand’s communication is all about seamless, frictionless user experience. Reality is that the website navigation would need the skill and agility of a war mariner.

Your neighbourhood health clinic(part of a large hospital & healthcare chain- yes the one that uses the four letter word 'care' at every nook & corner) has given you an appointment after you held on patiently and listened to badly chosen music that plays on the IVR for a good 7 minutes before you got a human on the line. By the end of it, you may or may not get an appointment, but a new ailment is guaranteed. Which your insurance may not cover.

Sum summarum, what I want to highlight here is that what gets practiced is what the culture encourages. It is mostly top down. After all a brand is a story that we tell and expect our constituents to carry forward the baton on and touch the customer in ways that enhances, resolves, inspires and gets them coming back for more.

Time to introspect? ” Your call is important to us and will be attended to shortly “. ” This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes “. For God’s sake, stop lying!!

ENDS