Operationalizing the Brand - Aligning Promise with Reality

Call me Joe Marketinguy. I like big marketing ideas. Bold promises. Sexy websites, glossy collateral materials, flashy TV spots, you name it. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get my brand top-of-mind, consumer by consumer.

Down the hall is my colleague, Steve Salesman. He likes the razzle-dazzle too; after all, it helps him land business. However, Steve is a bit more reticent about some of the bolder promises the company makes. When some of the marketing promise turns out to be…a bit of a stretch, life can get uncomfortable for Steve.

Luckily, Steve’s an old pro. He knows the perfect way to disarm the customer - the right roll of the eyes, inside joke and conspiratorial tone of voice when he says, “well, you know those marketing guys…” In fact, the customer does know marketing guys, and Mr. Salesman and the customer have a good chuckle.

Further down the hall sits Sue Operations. She’s squarely on the front-line. What I promise, she’s supposed to deliver. So when my promise far exceeds our company’s operational and service capabilities…let’s just say Sue isn’t quite as charitable as Steve Salesman. And when she tells the customer “You can’t possibly expect that – that @#&% Marketinguy,” no one is laughing.

This scenario may sound completely dysfunctional or unsettling familiar…or both. While it’s certainly exaggerated, it probably resembles the silo effect that plagues many organizations. Sales and Marketing vs. Operations. Human Resources vs. Training. Corporate Headquarters vs. Branch Managers. IT vs. everyone. And while all of these departments are busy jousting or – worse yet – ignoring one another, who gets the short end of the proverbial stick? That’s right – the customer. The customer doesn’t care that marketing promised this, and IT dropped the ball on that, and HR just hired some stiff. They just want what was promised to them, delivered consistently.

What our company is lacking is the ability to “operationalize” our brand. Clearly, we have no problem creating a strong, attractive brand promise – as Joe Marketinguy, I have more than taken care of that. Our ads are good and the brand promise is coming through loud and clear to the external audience. What’s missing is the internal agreement on the brand experience and how to deliver on it. That level of dissonance is invisible to the customer, but makes it virtually impossible to satisfy them.

Think about it – if the real-world delivery of the product or service in question can not possibly match the promise of that product…well, it’s safe to say that the entire customer experience is going to be short of expectations. Chances are the products and brands that have earned your allegiance over time aren’t necessarily the most expensive or innovative. Rather, they’re the ones that deliver, time after time - your favorites don’t smack a home run on Tuesday and strikeout on Wednesday. They line a solid double into the gap, every time.

And that’s why Southwest Airlines has a customer base every bit as loyal, if not more so, than Singapore Airlines. Southwest customers aren’t expecting flutes of champagne in the passenger cabin – nor are they getting them – but they are getting a friendly, efficient travel experience, from Sarasota to San Jose. That precise level of execution, whether it’s applied to Dom Perignon or a smile and a wave, is the sort of brand promise delivery that inspires customer satisfaction and loyalty.

We all know that an effective advertising campaign will drive consumers to your door. Once there, all future purchase behavior is based solely on the efficacy of that experience. It’s easy to make promises. It’s much harder to deliver on them.

Think of an iceberg. If you’re the lookout on a ship, what you see above the water is really only about 10-percent of the iceberg. That proverbial tip of the iceberg represents the brand promise. It’s the 90-percent under the water – the part that the lookout never sees but assumes is there – that gives the iceberg its strength. That underwater portion, my friends, is the culture, leadership, alignment, discipline and process necessary to “operationalize” the brand, and turn brand promise and customer strategy into operational reality.

When the brand execution is aligned with the brand promise, you have a powerful iceberg capable of sinking the Titanic. And when the brand execution is missing? Despite appearances on the surface, you really just have…ice cubes.

Let me tell you a quick story about an experience a colleague of mine had with Commerce Bank – a 300-branch regional player in the Northeast that is scaring some of the big boys silly because of their reputation for customer service. Said colleague realized five minutes before bank closing time that she was desperately in need of a roll of quarters to do some laundry. She phoned the closest bank branch to her house, which happened to be a Commerce, found out it was still open, briefly explained her situation, and rushed over. The teller she had spoken to on the phone was still there…and had kept the bank open ten minutes past closing. Best of all – my colleague isn’t a Commerce customer.

Nowhere in the Commerce customer service manual does it decree “stay open past closing to help non-customers with change needs.” But the leadership at Commerce found it was valuable to sit around a table with representatives from operations, IT, human resources, marketing and the branches, and map out the types of experiences they wanted their customers to have and the types of people they wanted to deliver those experiences. And then they created service standards, job descriptions and training to guide and empower those people to do the right thing at all times…for the customer. So where do you think my colleague is opening her next checking account? I guarantee you it will be at the “iceberg” with the big, red Commerce “C” out front.

So the next time you think about a new ad campaign and wonder whether you are internally aligned to deliver on that brand promise to benefit the customer, ask yourself one question. Is your company an iceberg…or an ice cube?



Operationalizing the Brand - Aligning Promise with Reality - To learn more about this author, visit Rob Rush's Website.

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