Archive | Branding RSS feed for this section

Think Personal Touch Doesn’t Matter To Your Brand?

by on March 6, 2012 in Branding

Think again, amigo. Today’s reminder comes from Klout, who actually did much to redeem itself by not hiding behind a faceless corporate persona. When it made a mistake in an email, the mea culpa came from their marketing associate’s personal Twitter account.

It started with an email received this morning from Klout letting me know about a perk. Note who it is addressed to.

Not sure who Lan is, but I semi-joked with Klout that if they think I’m Lando Calrissian they may have a slight problem (though, I do think I still have my smooth old-school Billy Dee moments).

The response I got back was not an anonymous, sorta sincere “Sorry about that” from the Klout account. Instead, a response came from Lan Nguyen, Klout’s marketing associate who constructed and sent the email.

Turns out Lan messed up the personalization and came clean about it. And you know what? Name me one marketer who hasn’t done the exact same thing when working with email. We all usually test but we can also get impatient, particularly when we have a gazillion other tasks to accomplish. And sometimes we’re working with email marketing platforms that make it exceptionally difficult to test even the simplest of personalizations let alone complex segmentations.

What’s the learning here?

  1. Make it easy for your customers to empathize with you. Don’t hide behind anonymous social media accounts. Smiling faces – like Lan’s – really do make a difference as to how people feel about your brand.
  2. Keep hammering away in your internal branding docs the value of being personable, real, and yes, vulnerable. Your customers are smart and they know when they’re getting the corporate treatment. Screw up? Then fess up and learn how to do better. I very much believe that Lan – after she deals with the barrage of confused/irritated tweets – will work doubly hard to not make the same mistake in the future.
  3. And reward employees for being human and putting a face on your brand. They only hide in the shadows of anonymity when they know they’re going to get shredded by management for screwing up.

What are your favorite examples of brands that know how to humanize their customer experience?

Why We Care About Corporate Logos

by on January 23, 2011 in Branding

I’ve been thinking a lot corporate logos, their meaning, and what it contributes to the customer experience. In a bit of serendipity, today I read this post from Derrick Daye at The Blake Project entitled Branding Debate: Does Logo Design Really Matter?. He writes:

What’s important are the associations people have with a logo–not the logo itself. A logo (trademark and its associated visual language) is the symbolic representation of a whole narrative story built into an organization over time. Brand equity is the result of successfully delivering on the promise your brand represents in the hearts and minds of consumers. Indeed, there are some time-tested design guidelines all enduring trademarks share, but that is not what enables them to endure. What makes a logo endure (and be cared about) is not the design, but the promise it represents.

When The Gap changed their logo (then backslid after an uproar in social media channels), I started to think about this enduring quality of logos and their meaning to consumers. At first, I was actually critical of the company for reverting their decision on the basis of a minor uproar. No one likes change so it’s always going to be a battle when a company decides to change something meaningful like a logo. And there’s always a segment of design creatives that will bitch and moan about anything that doesn’t please their own narrow aesthetic philosophy.

But then, I got curious about what all this might mean to the relationship between a company and their customers. Approaching it this way, a consumer’s attachment to a company’s brand, logo, and promise is a far more interesting exercise in seeking out symbolic meaning. The anthropologist, Victor Turner, argued that symbols are important because of their ability to both condense meaning as well as contain a multiplicity of meanings. While it may sound paradoxical, it actually illustrates the various layers in which a symbol – such as a logo – resides.

Let’s take Southwest Airlines, for example.
When we think of Southwest Airlines (even if we’ve never actually flown with them before), images and ideas come to mind. We know certain things about the business and the promise it represents. The logo becomes a sort of shorthand for how customers and company relate to each other. If Southwest decided to change their logo, it might signal a potential shift in this relationship. And because each customer has their own personal experience with the airline, the customer generates several meaningful impressions when confronted with the logo. We might think of their “Bags Fly Free” commercials or a memorable time we flew with them. We then attribute positive or negative meanings depending on these experiences.

Now, let’s juxtapose that with Enron.

A very different set of meanings are involved, right?

Here’s an exercise. Take a look at these logos and think about what the business is trying to convey to you. Now think about what that brand means to you. What feelings does it invoke? What brand promise does it represent? What’s the overall symbolism?

Logos and brands are just simplified, symbolic constructs that make it easier for customers to recognize and related to your business. Whether or not you decide to change your company’s logo, think about all the different ways you generate meaningful relationships with your customers. And then consider how your customers have created (or want to create) relationships with your business. It’s these relationships – embodied in your logo – that will prove a strength in good times and bad.

Buzz Is Overrated – Do This Instead

by on May 3, 2010 in Branding, Customer Experience

Last week, Reuters published an article called Americans more loyal to brands, country than company. For employers, it poses a wake-up call. But what I found most interesting was this statement at the end:

When asked how companies could improve loyalty the top answers included offering cash awards to consumers, replacing automatic answering machines with real people, making good products and not raising prices.

I think this shows why consumer opinion and sentiment shouldn’t always be taken at immediate face value. The way we think about things is complex and requires us to go exploring for more specific answers. This is were doing more qualitative work is an important complement to the quantitative work of surveys and polls.

Thinking about the snippet above from the Reuters article…What does making good products mean? How about not raising prices? Before you go thinking you know exactly what the answers are, take a step back and consider how many different possible answers are possible here. A good product can have a multitude of meanings in the mind of the customer. Now amplify it by hundreds or thousands of customers. And the desire to not raise prices may be contradicted if there is the possibility of adding more value to the product.

As an anthropologist, we’re trained to not just look at what’s said, but also look for what’s not said. Interestingly, what’s omitted here is listening. Well, sort of. We might be able to extract listening from the desire to talk to real people instead of answering machines. But…

What would happen if our companies set up experiences that encouraged customers to talk, to share ideas, to voice frustrations?

What would happen if we genuinely listened to what was said and not said?

What would happen if we took all of those opinions and sentiments and put them to action so our customers would feel heard?

Can you imagine how powerful that might be? Forget short-term buzz. Think long-term customer movements.

photo credit: abrinsky (via Flickr)

Hush Up And Just Enjoy Those Super Bowl Ads

by on February 8, 2010 in Branding, Media

I’m always fascinated with the day-after fallout of the Super Bowl adfest. There are plenty of people doing their Monday morning armchair quarterbacking thing, lamenting how terrible the commercials were and how much they continue to suck year after year. It’s at this point I try to take my branding hat off and recognize something I think is rather important. The commercials were not made for us. They were made for the 95% of everyone else who wants to be entertained. They were made for people like my dad who could give two craps if there was an overabundance of slapstick violence and dudes trying to pick up chicks (Love you, Dad!). The only metric here is whether the ads were amusing and some of them were very amusing and entertaining, indeed.

Time for all of us who claim to be brand and online cognoscenti to get off our high horse and recognize that Super Bowl ads are not Shakespeare and they don’t need to be earth-shatteringly original. These commercials are made to appeal to a broad population and that population sits right in the middle of America. Like it or not. They like watching Betty White and Abe Vigoda get creamed in a football game, they like dudes wearing Doritos and attacking people, (and I guess they must like guys wandering the African savanna in their underwear).

Of course, feel free to not take my word for it. I grew up on Benny Hill and The Three Stooges so dumb, risque, slapstick humor is part of my cultural heritage.

Community, Not Campaigns For Small Business

by on January 13, 2010 in Branding, Communities, Social Media

Lego People CommunityIs your business still thinking of marketing as a set of campaigns? It might be time to switch gears and start thinking more about connecting with prospects and customers via community. Today, we learned that two major brands are rethinking their strategies (also read here):

Coca-Cola and Unilever are shifting their digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, as social media begins to dictate their marketing activity in 2010.

Yes, these are the big kahunas of the corporate branding universe…but can their strategies work for small and medium-sized businesses? Not only do I think the answer is a resounding “100% yes!”, I believe that building community over campaigns is an absolute must for nearly any enterprise today. Why?

Read the full blogpost at BaileyHill Insights…

photo credit: scoobay (via Flickr)