Introduction: On-Brand or Off-Brand

What is a brand?

At its most basic level, a brand is a unique identity. It is a shorthand way the public thinks about what you do, produce, serve, and sell.

When well conceived and developed, a brand is a vibrant picture held in consumers' minds. Well-executed brands are worth millions, even billions of dollars, in sales and shareholder value. Brands stand out like beacons of light in a sea awash with high-quality products and services offered to meet consumer-expression needs, as consumers choose brands in great part to tell the world and themselves who they are. Branding is a central element of marketing strategies. The consumer in effect believes, "The only way I can be who I am is to have specific products or services." A powerful brand, therefore, creates a must-have quasi monopoly for itself.

So, what is branded customer service?

It's an additional and huge way to further distinguish a brand's unique identity. Branded customer service goes way beyond generic service. It even is more than excellent service. It is a strategic and organized way to deliver on-brand customer experiences that magnify brand promises. It adds value to target markets by driving home the essence of a brand. In so doing, branded customer service can become so valuable that it takes on the power of a brand unto itself.

When service experiences are aligned with brand promises, a multiplying effect occurs that is significantly more engaging than just a well-recognized brand name. When service experiences do not match brand promises, as so frequently happens, trust is undermined and brand erosion occurs. This gap is costly and can ruin or seriously diminish a good advertising campaign. For all these reasons, branded customer service is the new competitive edge in the service economy.

Some time ago, an Australian bank made a promise that customers would be given $5 if they had to wait longer than five minutes for a teller. The promise (with its well-crafted subtext message that the bank valued its customers' time so much that they would never waste more than five minutes of it) attracted customers. Unfortunately, the bank failed in its delivery. Employees got so hassled trying to deliver on the unrealistic, maximum-five-minute promise that the bank had to retract its promise. The result? Immediate, widely publicized, and significant brand erosion.

On the other hand, another bank has successfully integrated its brand advertising into its service culture. The bank recently measured the impact of its advertising, comparing reactions of customers with noncustomers. The research concluded that customers who had both seen the bank's advertisements and experienced its service had the strongest positive associations with the brand's attributes, which are listed on the following chart.

Customers who had merely experienced the bank's service without seeing the ads had a lower association with the bank's brand attributes. And for noncustomers who saw the ads but did not receive any reinforcement through service of the brand promise, the associations with the attributes were still lower. Conclusion: a combination of strong advertising to let customers know what they should expect and then consistently delivering the advertised service results in the most positive brand associations, as figure 1 illustrates. ^[1]

Figure 1: The power of branded service experiences In reinforcing advertising

This research, based on 780 interviews conducted between January and March 2002, demonstrates that there is a real market opportunity for companies to forge stronger relationships with customers. Such relationships take advantage of the multiplying effect of actually delivering unique service experiences that have been promised in advertising, via public relations, or on the Web. When service is branded and combined with a solid product offering, you have a winning combination that can reduce the impact of your competitors. It will be difficult, in fact, for others to copy you if you continually reinforce and magnify your unique brand position through parallel service delivery.

Brand promises meet customers' psychological needs beyond the simple and functional. Even though brands speak to large population groups, customers experience them as personal connections to products and services. This personal connection is what creates brand engagement and commitment. As actor and film producer Robert Redford says, "If it's not personal, then there won't be any passion or commitment." ^[2]

We predict that in a few years, businesses will make a clear distinction between generic customer service and branded customer service. The distinction between old-fashioned, good generic service and branded customer service will be understood in the same way that the marketplace today understands the distinction between generic products and branded products—such as with generic prescription drugs versus brand-name drugs. We further predict that on-brand service, a term we use to describe customer service that is aligned with brand promises, will become the standard that twenty-first-century businesses use to judge service. Once people are introduced to the terms on-brand and off-brand, they immediately grasp the concept and understand how on-and off-brand service is not identical to good and bad service.

This book outlines ways to reinforce both the logical and emotional aspects of your brand through service delivery. We consider brands when they are seen through the focus of customer service. We also reverse the proposition and consider customer service when it is seen through the focus of branding. Whichever way you look at it, our ultimate goal is to help you build equity for your brand (increased name recognition, more loyal customers, increased market share, and higher margins) by offering you a standard by which to craft the human part of your customer service so it stays on-brand. You can then take advantage of what branding experts have long known: a strong brand is indeed a very valuable asset.

Finally, as customers raise the bar on the service they expect, organizations that do not brand their service offerings will be at a distinct disadvantage. We will show you how to align the dynamics of your customer service in Redford's "passionate and committed" way with the promises and persona of your carefully defined brand. This book will show you what is necessary to avoid being left behind.

Why this Book Now?

Despite all the money invested in branding, most brands underperform. The major reason for this is that most branding strategies today still rely heavily on advertisements, marketing, endorsements, and other media-based approaches in an economy that has become predominantly service based. We contend that organizations can gain the maximum return from brand expenditures when everyone—rather than just the marketing department—reinforces the brand.

Service organizations continue to use, without much questioning, branding models that are more appropriate to fast-moving consumer goods, or FMCG. The key element in the chain, the actual service experience, is often overlooked because either advertising agencies and traditional marketers typically do not have core competencies in this area or they do not have the mandate to shape and influence it. The service component of the brand experience is therefore a powerful competitive weapon, waiting to be unleashed. As one hotelier recently remarked to us, "Our marketing collateral is very good. But do we deliver? If we really delivered what we imply, our customer-return rate would be much higher."

For this reason, this book focuses on the two main organizational audiences that need more than image-based strategies to gain maximum market share: those that are exclusively service based and those that are product based but with a large component of service. When a large part of what you have to offer consumers is delivered through people, customer experiences that reinforce your brand messages are perhaps the most enduring means of keeping and even getting customers. James Gilmore and Joe Pine, authors of The Experience Economy, express a viewpoint that has become widely accepted: "People have become relatively immune to messages targeted at them. The way to reach your customers is to create an experience within them." ^[3]

We were inspired to write Branded Customer Service after surveying the market and exchanging ideas with a number of our consulting clients and other experts in the field of branding. We came to the conclusion that if advertising dollars and marketing efforts communicate one brand message and staff deliver something different, an organization is wasting money and probably has an image problem!

We read countless pages of literature on branding and discovered a marketplace filled with books and articles written predominantly by branding experts—not customer service experts. Many recently released books do discuss the importance of customer service in brand development, but they are extremely broad in their coverage and primarily address how organizational culture supports delivery of the brand. While addressing important topics, these books give little mention to what we see is one of the most important and yet overlooked topics in this field: how employees can actually deliver their organizational brands when they are engaged in activity that directly or indirectly affects customers.

It is very useful for a retail chain of stores, for example, that makes a brand promise to "always be there to help customers" to align its material service (processes, product availability and range, opening hours, and locations) to deliver that promise. However, the brand promise will still fall short if the store employees do not understand the importance of their own behavior in supporting this brand promise.

For example, if employees stand in rapt conversation with each other—in full view of a long line of customers waiting to be served—that will be experienced as off-brand by customers. Staff may miss the point that their "innocent" behavior, however justified it may be, erodes confidence in the retail chain's brand position as much as an ineffective advertisement can turn off customers. A brand statement can be made with off-brand nonverbal staff behavior: "We say we are, but, in fact, we aren't always there to help you." The brand effort is hijacked—or at best, is not taken advantage of—unless employees are aware of and understand the consequences of all their brand-related behaviors.

^[1]We have been given permission to share this research on the condition that we do not name the bank involved.

^[2]As quoted in an interview on NPR, September 9, 2003.

^[3]James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, "The Experience IS the Marketing," Strategic Horizons LLP, 2002.