The 10 Most Overrated Brands? July 6, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Branding.Tags: Apple, Southwest Airlines, The Gap, Los Angeles Lakers, Oprah, MTV, Dunkin' Donuts, Victoria's Secret, Trump
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I just ran across a slide show on Boston.com called Lucas Conley’s 10 most overrated brands. Conley, who just wrote a book called OBD (Obsessive Brand Disorder), points to these 10 “tired” brands:
- Southwest Airlines (The airline’s issue with safety inspections and its subsequent reaction has tarnished it’s fun-loving image).
- The Gap (After trying a myriad of media tricks to get attention and 15 quarters of declining sales drops, the retailer has suspended TV ads).
- The Los Angeles Lakers (Unlike the “Showtime” brand of the past, the Lakers couldn’t even keep the attention of their own fans)
- Oprah (”Oprah’s Big Give” TV show was an instant flop and one of the many recent stumbles for the overexposed media queen).
- MTV (No more full-length videos, and the station’s programming now amounts to reductive reality crossovers and tasteless dating shows).
- Dunkin’ Donuts (The new owners pushed DD coffee into stores and supermarkets while touting Rachel Ray and dismantling of the firm’s original neon sign).
- Victoria’s Secret (Since 2004, when the company hired unsexy folk legend Bob Dylan to appear in ads, Victoria’s Secret has been groping in the dark)
- Apple (In an age when no-name companies make phones of equal quality at a fraction of the price of an iPhone, how long can Apple keep sales and its cool factor up?)
- Trump (Trump has become a trinket tycoon, feverishly trading in on his name to peddle a bazaar’s worth of crap… like Trump water and Trump cologne).
- The Everybrand (I didn’t quite get what he was saying about this one)
My take: I agree with many, but not all, of the brands on the list…
- I agree with these being on the list:
- Trump (enough of him already), Oprah (she’s overplayed, but give her snaps for doing some good things for society), Victoria’s Secret (it can’t quite get sexy right), Los Angelas Lakers (go Celtics!), The Gap (it’s down now, but I’m hopeful for a comeback), and MTV (I can’t take any more reality).
- I disagree with these being on the list:
- Apple (it’s coolness still has some staying power); Southwest Airlines (it can recover from the recent snafu) and Dunkin’ Donuts (okay, I just like Rachel Ray).
The bottom line: Your brand is a terrible thing to waste.
Ford (Finally) Turns Employees Into Brand Ambassadors April 26, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Branding, Customer experience, EBD #2: Reinforce The Brand With Every Interaction, EBD #3: Treat Customer Experience As A Competence.Tags: Ford
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I just read a BrandWeek article called Ford Asks Employees, Dealers to Spread Ad Message that talks about Ford’s new campaign called “Drive one” which includes a push for employees and dealers to spread the word. Jim Farley group vp-marketing and communications for Ford explains it this way:
The whole idea behind this campaign is not fancy ads. It’s talking to the customer, who talks to a friend. It’s the only chance we have to break the apathy.
My take: As I talked about in my previous post about John Hancock, advertising alone can’t dramatically change a company’s positioning. It takes a shift in how you interact with customers. That means you need to get employees involved (and for car makers, it means dealers as well). So this approach makes absolute sense. Yet, something is wrong.
The fact that Ford is making such a big deal out of this approach means that it’s an unusual occurance. So the car maker does NOT regularly engage employees and dealers in its advertising efforts. That’s a problem. Employees and the entire front line need to be developed into ambassadors for any campaign. And if they can’t promote it, then that’s probably a good sign that the campaign is not a good one.
When I interviewed the CMO for JetBlue several years ago, she told me that she spent half of her time communicating the brand message internally. Sounds like a good benchmark.
The bottom line: CMOs need to become CMMOs, Chief Marketing And Motivational Officers.
John Hancock Repositioning Provides Lesson About Empty Promises April 24, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Branding, Customer experience, EBD #2: Reinforce The Brand With Every Interaction, Experience-Based Differentiation, Financial services.Tags: John Hancock
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John Hancock announced a new ad campaign called “Cursor” that showcases two areas: the rise of digital communications and the opportunity for financial success. It is trying to reintroduce the company to the public as a relevant and inspirational brand. Here’s how Jim Bacharach, vp-advertising at John Hancock described the campaign:
The thinking behind the campaign was to recognize where consumer sentiment is today. The unstable economy is a source of anxiety for a lot of folks. One of the key differences from what we’ve done in the past is that today, more than ever, these conversations take place through electronic media.
My take: Right below is the John Hancock homepage (from earlier this week). Other than the discussion of the new “Cursor” ad campaign in the lower right, is there anything about this page that reinforces the notion of relevance, inspiration, or digital conversations?
I didn’t bring this up to pick on John Hancock’s Website or even to discuss its repositioning efforts. Instead, I wanted to (re)make a point that advertising alone can not reposition a company.
While ad campaigns can certainly introduce new brand promises, repositioning can only occur of the company actually keeps those promises during all of its interactions. That’s why the second principle of Experience-Based Differentiation is: Reinforce the brand in every interaction, not just communications.
Without designing all touchpoints to fulfill the new brand promises, the hope for repositioning is likely to just lead to empty promises:
Probability Of Success For Branding Efforts
The bottom line: Don’t waste your marketing dollars on empty promises.
Lessons From Miller (Not So) Genuine Draft April 9, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Branding, Customer experience.Tags: Miller
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An article in Advertising Age called Is Miller Genuinely Daft? started off with the following sentence that I really liked:
Beer marketing 101: The most consistent brands fare best.
It turns out that Miller Genuine Draft is about to get its 8th tagline since 2001. The pitches have ranged from juvenile sexual humor to superior cold filtration brewing. During that timeframe, shipments have dropped 41%.
My take: As I’ve said many times, brands represent promises to customers. And firms need to deliver on those promises. If a company keeps changing its branding, then it can run into two major problems: 1) employees and distribution partners have a hard time internalizing and delivering on those promises; and 2) consumers get confused about what’s being promised.
It can become nearly impossible to deliver on a shifting set of promises. That was a key part of the message in my post Firms Need Some Soul Searching.
The bottom line: Keep in mind that confusion is contagious.
Chase Can’t Advertise Its Way To Customer Friendliness January 11, 2008
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Branding, Customer experience, EBD #2: Reinforce The Brand With Every Interaction, Experience-Based Differentiation, Financial services.add a comment
J.P. Morgan Chase is planning to unveil a new campaign called “Chase What Matters” in an effort to reposition itself as being more customer friendly. Here’s a quote from a news release on the topic:
“We’re launching it across all lines of business at Chase, working in partnership with our retail side so all branches and all Chase-branded products will be under this campaign,” said Sangeeta Prasad, svp-branding and advertising for Chase
My take: First of all, lets look at some data that I’ve published about Chase:
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In Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, Chase came out 72nd for its credit cards and tied for 103rd for its banking, out of 112 firms. That’s 8th out of 11 credit card providers and 13th out of 14 banks.
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In an analysis of multi-channel customer experience of 4 large credit card issuers that we published last May, Chase did the poorest with it’s Website and the best with its IVR, email, and cross channel transitions. But overall, none of the four firms did very well.
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In an analysis of financial services brand perceptions that we published this past February, consumers were considerably less likely than the industry average to describe Chase using the following terms: “honest,” “friendly,” “family-oriented,” and ”helpful.”
Chase certainly has its work cut out to be viewed as customer friendly.
But is the firm’s problem really its advertising slogan? Will a high recall rate for “Chase What Matters” make customers think that Chase is customer-friendly? I doubt it. To change customer perception, Chase needs to follow the second principle of Experience-Based Differentiation:
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Reinforce brands with every interaction, not just communications. Traditional brand messaging is losing its power to influence consumers — that’s why branding efforts need to expand beyond marketing communications to help define how customers should be treated. To master EBD, firms must articulate their brand attributes to both customers and employees, clearly describing how the firm wants to be viewed. That’s just the first step, because companies must go on to translate brand attributes into requirements for how they’ll interact with customers.
The bottom line: Don’t waste money on brand promises that you can’t keep.
Trend Watch #2: The McKinsey Quarterly “Eight Business Technology Trends To Watch” December 27, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in 2008 trend watch, Branding, Customer experience, Marketing to Gen Y, Online strategy.2 comments
In this Trend Watch, I’m taking a closer look at the following article from The McKinsey Quarterly: “Eight Business Technology Trends To Watch.” While you can see the full list of trends at the bottom of this post, here are the five items that I think are most important for customer experience:
#2) Using Consumers As Innovators. Excerpt: “As the Internet has evolved - an evolution prompted in part by new Web 2.0 technologies - it has become a more widespread platform for interaction, communication, and activism. Consumers increasingly want to engage online with one another and with organizations of all kinds.”
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My take: What’s a trends doc without a reference to Web 2.0?!? I’m not sure that online consumers will become the core innovative force for companies in 2008, but firms definitely need to tap into the online voice of customers — as they blog, write customer reviews, and connect with each other in new ways on the Internet. This is particularly true if you’re going after younger consumers.
#3) Tapping Into A World Of Talent. Excerpt: “As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence… The best person for a task may be a free agent in India or an employee of a small company in Italy.”
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My take: The Net definitely makes it easier to tap into a variety of workers in new ways. But it’s hard enough to keep a centralized workforce aligned; think about how hard it is when the talent is ultra-dispersed. In this environment, it is even more important that companies have a clear sense of purpose and a well defined and internally-communicated brand (see principle #2 of Experience-Based Differentiation). These items will help maintain consistency across the myriad of activities and decisions that go one across your company.
#5) Expanding The Frontiers Of Automation. Excerpt: “Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What’s more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities.”
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My take: The combination of service-oriented architecture (which connects disparate applications) and business process management systems (which can flexibly control processes) opens up the opportunity to automate many processes. Firms will squeeze inefficiencies out of customer-facing processes like applications, problem resolution, and credit approval. But don’t just automate processes; redesign them to better meet the needs of customers.
#6) Unbundling Production From Delivery. Excerpt: “Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever-smaller increments cost effectively… Unbundling is attractive from the supply side because it lets asset-intensive businesses raise their utilization rates and therefore their returns on invested capital. On the demand side, unbundling offers access to resources and assets that might otherwise require a large fixed investment”
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My take: Interestingly, in 2000 we wrote a report called eBusiness Networks in which we predicted that: “Processes like customer care that span manufacturer, distributor, and retailer can be shared in eBusiness networks. Rather than design captive business processes, companies will plug into shared systems.”So I’m bought into this unbundling trend. Every firm needs to ask themselves: “How can my product/service be delivered as a metered service?”
#7) Putting More Science Into Management. Excerpt: “Just as the Internet and productivity tools extend the reach of and provide leverage to desk-based workers, technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models… The holy grail of deep customer insight-more granular segmentation, low-cost experimentation, and mass customization-becomes increasingly accessible through technological innovations in data collection and processing.”
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My take: No doubt; there’s more data than ever. So make sure you’ve got some strong left-brainers around to look at Web analytics and customer analytics; there’s a lot of valuable insights to be mined. But don’t get caught over-focusing on analysis — it’s only one part of the equation. Your organization needs to treat customers differently based on the insights and this often takes more ”art” than “science.”
8 Business Technology Trends To Watch from McKinsey
Here are all of the items listed in The McKinsey Quarterly:
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Distribution co-creation
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Using Consumers As Innovators
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Tapping Into A World Of Talent
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Extracting More Value From Interactions
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Expanding The Frontiers Of Automation
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Unbundling Production From Delivery
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Putting More Science Into Management
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Making Businesses From Information.
Also see: Trend Watch #1: The Economist “The World In 2008 (Business)
The bottom line: Look for a lot more connectivity; but temper it with common sense.
Ten Customer Experience Resolutions For 2008 December 17, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Branding, Customer experience, Customer-centric DNA, Experience-Based Differentiation.5 comments
Alas, 2008 is almost upon us. Which makes me think of this sentence from “Little Gidding” by T.S. Elliott:
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.
With that in mind, here are 10 New Year’s resolutions that your company should consider making about its customer experience efforts:
- We shall focus more on our customers and less on ourselves
- We shall get to know more about what our customers really need
- We shall formalize a voice-of-the-customer program
- We shall incorporate personas in our experience design processes
- We shall clearly define our brand in terms of promises to customers
- We shall judge every interaction on how well it fulfills our brand promises
- We shall engage front-line employees in improving customer experiences
- We shall get the executive team to collectively own the customer experience
- We shall establish a multi-year journey towards customer-centric DNA
- We shall give customer experience the attention that it deserves
If you’re on board for some or all of these resolutions, make sure to read about Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD), which can act as a blueprint. And you can use the EBD self-test as a starting point.
The bottom line: Put customer experience on the top of your 2008 agenda!
Words Of Wisdom: Mayor Booker On Focus October 4, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Branding, Words of wisdom.add a comment
I was reading the New York Times this past Wednesday and ran across a front page article called In Newark, the Mayor’s Crusade Gets Personal. It’s a great story about how Mayor Cory Booker of Newark finds time to be a “big brother to three young men from some of the toughest streets.” In the article, he’s quoted as saying to one of the boys:
Life is about focus. What you focus on, you become. If you focus on nothing, you become nothing.
If he wasn’t a mayor, he could have been a management consultant. His words are as powerful in a corporate setting as I hope they are for the boys that he mentors.
My take: To master Experience-Based Differentiation , firms need a lot of focus. They need to hone in on target markets; they need to design experiences for specific behavioral-based segments (see this post: Words Of Wisdom: Stanley Marcus On Customers As People); they need to identify the key elements of their brand (see this post: Firms Need Some Soul Searching) ; and they need to consistently set priorities based on all of those areas of focus.
But, all too frequently, firms don’t have the discipline to get that focused. The firms that attempt to do all things for all people, end up serving no-one particularly well.
The bottom line: Focus, focus, focus!
Firms Need Some Soul Searching September 25, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Branding, Customer experience, Executive leadership, Words of wisdom.1 comment so far
Let me start with an observation: most organizations have lost their souls.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on a diatribe about Satan or religious redemption. What I mean is that most organizations don’t know what they stand for — they’ve benchmarked themselves into cookie-cutter imitations of all their competitors. It’s really hard to tell the actual difference between banks or retailers or airlines or whatever. Firms try to use marketing gimmicks to fool customers into believing that there’s a real difference. And some more advanced firms use micro-segmentation and analytics to deliver customized messages to smaller and smaller groups of people. But, alas, customers are getting smarter — and any type of marketing pitch is becoming less effective. So what are firms to do?
Find your soul!
The path to redemption starts by anwering two questions (honestly):
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How is your organization truly different?
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How do you want your organization to be truly different?
These questions need to be asked from the perspective of all of your key constituent groups, which for most companies starts with customers and employees. Howard Shultz, founder and Chairman of Starbucks, has been quoted as saying…
Customers must recognize that you stand for something.
If your looking for me to now provide a step-by-step process for saving your souls, you’ll be disappointed. While I’ll probably touch on some left-brained approaches in future posts, the path to salvation starts with a more right-brain commitment to re-defining or re-invigorating what your organization stands for. So instead of reading some itemized advice, I suggest that you start by watching this video…
The bottom line: It’s time to find (or restore) your organization’s soul!
Experience-Based Differentiation June 17, 2007
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Branding, Customer experience, Customer loyalty, Experience-Based Differentiation.4 comments
Earlier this year, I published a report called Experience-Based Differentiation (only Forrester Research clients can read the full report). As of this point in time, it’s Forrester’s most-read report this year. I’ll get into some of the details about the report a little later in this post, but I’d like to talk about the report’s popularity a bit. Why have so many people wanted to read this report?
I don’t have hard data on why everyone’s reading my research, but I’ll throw out a hypothesis: Many execs believe that: 1) customer experience is critical to their future success (I do have data on this in my research) and 2) they currently deliver subpar experiences to their customers. This alone provides enough motivation for reading the report. But I think there’s something else at play as well.
Customer experience is, well, that’s the thing… what exactly is customer experience? Many people know that it’s important, but most people don’t really know what it is. That creates a black hole of insight — which generates a lot of demand for this type of research. My goal is to help shrink this black hole.
Now, on to some information about Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD) which we define as:
A systematic approach to interacting with customers that consistently builds loyalty.
Don’t focus too much on the definition. Instead, take a closer look at the three principles of EBD:
- Obsess about customer needs, not product features. Rather than racing to bring new product features to market, companies need to refocus on the needs of their customers — who might even want fewer features. While most firms have invested in customer analytics, even the largest data warehouse and most sophisticated software can’t model the nuances of human likes and needs. That’s why firms should augment data crunching with some old-fashioned techniques like talking to customers and observing their experience. This insight needs to be widely communicated across the organization.
- Reinforce brands with every interaction, not just communications. Traditional brand messaging is losing its power to influence consumers — that’s why branding efforts need to expand beyond marketing communications to help define how customers should be treated. To master EBD, firms must articulate their brand attributes to both customers and employees, clearly describing how the firm wants to be viewed. That’s just the first step, because companies must go on to translate brand attributes into requirements for how they’ll interact with customers.
- Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function. Delivering great customer experiences isn’t something that a small group of people can do on their own — everyone in the company needs to be fully engaged in the effort. It all starts at the top; the CEO and his executive team need to be fully engaged in the effort. To keep a companywide focus on customers, companies need a systematic and continuous approach for incorporating customer insights into all of their efforts. That’s why we recommend building a voice-of-the-customer program. (Note from Bruce: voice-of-the-customer is another hazy concept out there – that’s why we defined a five level model for voice-of-the customer; we’ll definitely touch on that topic in later posts.)
EBD is a core focus of my research, so you’ll definitely find these concepts making their way into future blog posts. But for know, I encourage everyone to add thoughts or examples of how companies can head towards Experience-Based Differentiation.
