Stretch: Finding Your Space between Brand Push and Pull

Because employees spend enormous amounts of time at work, they potentially have a highly involved relationship with their brand employer. By using the complementary dimensions of push and pull (brand stretch) and simultaneously paying attention to the brand power tools of likability, reinforcement, and consistency (see chapter 5), brand promises and values can motivate staff and create brand service momentum.

• Push. When brand values have been carefully developed and linked to business strategy, they support and add credibility to the brand. They explain how and why the organization can lay claim to its brand promises. Pusher (as he prefers to be called) Mark Di Somma suggests that brand values "act as a personality litmus, ensuring the company remains focused on what's important." ^[9] When staff live and work by these reinforced values, delivery of brand promises becomes possible.

  Brand values provide a framework for designing and implementing integrated systems, processes, measurements, and rewards that will align employee behaviors to the service culture that underpins the brand. This pushes staff from the inside to adopt the skills, attitudes, and standards necessary to meet customers' needs within a consistent delivery space, as in, for example, "guaranteed overnight delivery."

• Pull. The brand promise—who we are and what we stand for—is an expression of a company's vision in its simplest form. It acts as a unifying force across all parts of the organization. As employees become emotionally engaged with the brand they represent, they become pulled toward it. If the brand has strength and excitement, it gives staff a sense of identity, a feeling of belonging, and makes them feel positive about going to work. It also provides a clear sense of common purpose, a strong customer focus, and an orientation toward the future. This becomes the impetus to pull on-brand behavior so staff want to be the very best they can for their customers.

  People who work in strongly branded companies understand what the company is promising, because the promise is actively promoted internally. Then, every time service representatives see their brand presented in advertisements, marketing literature, or billboards, it builds their self-esteem and reminds them of the promises being made to customers so they are pulled to deliver it. It helps build commitment.

This influence is not to be underestimated. When Paul worked with a New Zealand company called Baycorp, it faced a major challenge in shifting perceptions about the brand. The public primarily knew Baycorp for the debt collection and credit referencing services it had provided for twenty-five years. This perception was out of touch with the reality of the technology- and data-based business solutions company Baycorp had become. Yet the lingering and disparaging reputation as a debt collector dramatically impacted staff. The brand had never been actively managed. As a result, staff beliefs were primarily shaped by what outsiders thought about them. If you tell employees often enough that they are a sore or parasite on society, it is not long before the service culture starts to reflect that.

Simply pushing from the inside to change these destructive behaviors could achieve only so much. However, when Baycorp combined a powerful brand marketing strategy—deployed externally and internally—that reflected the current reality of what the company offered, the self-esteem of staff and the behaviors that they deemed to be on-brand improved rapidly and significantly.

Ideally, if brands are to provide such an impetus to shift employee behavior, they need an element of stretch. Even though the goal is to align service delivery with the brand promise, an organization's brand promise does not have to be exactly reflected in employee behavior. The pull or aspiration can hint at something better than today's reality, but not to an extreme. After all, we know that when we buy a new car, young shapely women dressed in bikinis do not normally drape themselves over our shiny automobile, as they frequently do in ads. Likewise, the push or standards can be challenging to deliver all the time, but again, not to an extreme.

Rather than talk about the disparity that often exists between brand values and branded service delivery, we can more appropriately talk about tension or stretch between the best way we can represent our brand (pull) and our minimum standards of brand delivery (push). Brand stretch, when carefully deployed, has the inherent capacity to simultaneously push and pull employees to show them what to do and how to do it. The right degree of stretch keeps staff on their toes to meet the challenge of delivering the brand promise.

Too much pull and employees give up and become cynical. "Sure, this is what our advertising says, but actually we are nothing like that." From a customer service perspective, "continuous delight" and "constantly exceeding expectations" are examples of pull aspirations that are simply too high. Too much push and employees also give up and become cynical. "There's no way we can do that all the time." For example, 100 percent satisfaction guaranteed is too high a push target.

What is the right amount of stretch? It varies from situation to situation depending upon the type of culture, momentum already created, and how committed management is to supporting the change required. However, as a rule of thumb, if the feeling of most staff is "Yes, when we are near our best, that's us," then you are probably in the ballpark.

One of the best examples of push and pull we have seen is that of the World Bank. Its mission is to end world poverty. There is a lot of pull in that mission, and absolute fulfillment would seem unachievable. Yet few of us would disagree that any significant progress toward it is a worthwhile achievement, which is why World Bank staff are remarkably in touch with that aspiration on a day-to-day basis. On the push side, the World Bank has established high quality standards that encourage its delivery of services to the local agencies it serves.

In so many organizations, however, we have seen millions of dollars invested in the right marketing literature. We have also seen not a penny spent on engaging staff so they really understand and begin to live the brand and values. In these vacuum circumstances, staff, just like customers, develop their own beliefs about the brand (we're untrustworthy, we do not deliver, we frequently disappoint, we lack integrity) and what is required of them.

off-brand

Some time ago, one of New Zealand's leading banks ran a major television advertising campaign with the tagline "Knowledge Makes the Difference." The bank was implicitly saying it had more information, ideas, and expertise that allowed it to better meet the specific needs of individual customers than its competitors.

One of our colleagues heard the bank's radio ad, which announced a free "Hot Tips" brochure for rental property investors was available to anybody who dropped by a branch. Although he was not a customer of the bank, our friend was hooked by the offer. He stopped by to pick up both bank literature and the brochure. To his dismay, not only was the brochure not available, but a very pleasant customer service representative did not "have any knowledge" about it. "They never tell us about these things," she said apologetically. Needless to say, this prospective customer was not swayed to set up an account with the "knowledge makes the difference" bank.

Could good generic customer service have taken care of our colleague's experience with this bank? The bank clerk, after all, was not rude. She was not particularly slow. She was not incompetent. She simply had no knowledge about the free brochure—knowledge that linked to the bank's brand tagline and advertised messages. Through no fault of her own she delivered off-brand service. Based on her comment, this type of situation had apparently happened to her before, and she was no longer pulled or motivated to go out of her way to find the requested information.

American Express is remarkably good at defining its brand attributes. One aspect of a recent brand message is "Do More." However, it's clear the message hasn't been integrated at a customer service delivery level. A recent telephone call we made to handle a billing issue concluded with a barrage of obviously scripted sales statements for other services that were read so fast they were barely intelligible. The feeling we were left with was not "do more," as American Express wants to help its customers achieve, but rather one of imposition. No doubt, this effort was driven by the marketing department with little regard to how the messages would be delivered and how the customer would hear this barrage. Was it bad service? Not necessarily. Was it off-brand? No doubt. Listening to at least three minutes of sales messages, which were repeated twice, helps few people "do more." The time has come for marketing departments to stop delegating sales tasks to other departments without regard to impact on delivery. Staff will comply; they will plow through such messages but with little regard as to how they are received by consumers.

^[9]Mark Di Somma, in a confidential brand strategy paper.