The Heart of the Challenge: Delivering Brands Through Service Experiences

The most successful brands in the world, most of which are product brands, are tightly managed. By employing precise guidelines, marketers find it comparatively easy to manage consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, Colgate toothpaste, or Bayer aspirin. Assuring that a consistent container of Coca-Cola will end up in the consumers' hands, however, is considerably different than guaranteeing what will happen when customers and service providers have either direct or indirect contact.

A classic case is Morton Salt, the epitome of an FMCG. It has a strong brand character appealing to tradition, quality, and goodness and is offered with minimal service interaction. Salt is pretty much salt. Yet American consumers buy Morton Salt more than any other, primarily because people trust the character of the brand. Salt is a textbook example of a commodity. In this fast-changing world, even brands that are commodities can provide continuity in consumers' lives. ^[2] Most American families (Morton Salt was founded in 1848) grew up with the image of Morton's little girl, her umbrella, and free-flowing salt. Brands can become so strongly associated with events and people, such as childhood and our mothers, that we can literally feel the spirit of another person every time we engage the brand. ^[3]

Most consumers never have problems with Morton Salt, nor do they have to meet with representatives of Morton Salt who might challenge their experience of the brand. Grocery-store shoppers appreciate not having to decide which brand of salt to buy, even though they basically are all the same. When consumers make a salt purchasing decision at the end of a long day at work, their harried brains do not have to ponder which brand to purchase. In this world of seemingly endless choices, consumers appreciate this as well. And they are willing to pay a bit more for Morton to have that feeling of ease, security, and emotional connection with their past sitting in their kitchen cupboards.

When humans get involved with delivering service brands, meeting expectations created by advertising is far more difficult to guarantee. Controlling human service interactions, because of their dynamism, richness, and uniqueness, can be quite elusive. This is the key challenge for companies with products that have a high degree of customer service contact (software, automotive, telecommunication, hospitality, or airline companies) or whose product line is delivered exclusively through people (accounting, medical, legal, or publishing companies).

You can reinforce a brand idea, making it stronger with pictures, language, and behaviors—all of which evoke emotion. Human behavior is the primary means of brand reinforcement within the realm of customer service. It is easy for us to underestimate the impact of brands delivered by "collections of people joined together in pursuit of a common cause, and it is people who create value," as stated by brand expert Nicholas Ind. ^[4]

When service representatives and customers dance together in brand space, it is difficult to predict or control what will happen. As Rod Oram, a leading New Zealand business commentator, underscored in discussions with us about this topic, "It is relatively easy to design and make the perfect product in the controlled environment of a factory, but it is immensely harder to deliver perfect service in the incredibly random, unpredictable environment of customer service."

How can an organization meet the expectations of a tightly defined brand proposition but within the context of the very personal and individual experience that is customer service? This is the crux of the challenge and it again brings to mind the red-billed quelea flying in gigantic flocks, engaging in organized behavior while maintaining individual form.

^[2]For a complete discussion of the nostalgia factor and the role that brands play in evoking memories of the past, see Judith Langer, "What Consumers Wish Brand Managers Knew" (paper presented at Advertising Research Foundation Workshop, New York, April 1994).

^[3]For a complete discussion, see Fournier, "Consumers and Their Brands."

^[4]Nicholas Ind, "Living the Brand: Why Organizations Need Purpose and Values," The Journal of the Marketing Society, no. 15, (2001).