Improve “Compelling Brand Values” In 2011

As I mentioned in the post Build Customer Experience Competencies In 2011, I’m highlighting each of the four customer experience competencies as part of my effort to help companies put together their 2011 plans. Today’s post looks at…

Compelling Brand Values: Are your brand attributes driving decisions about how you treat customers?

As firms optimize left-brain management techniques for squeezing out additional profits, they’ve lost something very important — their raison d’être; many have even lost their soul. True brands are more than just marketing slogans; they are:

The fabric that aligns all employees with customers in the pursuit of a common cause.

The importance of a clear brand is captured in this (somewhat altered) quote by Howard Shultz:

Your brand is a set of promises that you make to customers that are kept (or unkept) by your employees. So this core competence is about understanding those promises and making sure that you live up to them during every interaction. As you can see from the results below of 140 companies who took Temkin Group’s Customer Experience Competency Assessment, most companies aren’t setup to keep those promises.

Companies need to make their brands more concrete and get the organization to interpret it into specific requirements. JetBlue, for instance, translated its “Jetitude” brand into five specific behaviors for its front line employees:

• Be in Blue always
• Be personal
• Be the answer
• Be engaging
• Be thankful to every customer

Here are some other posts that you may want to check out:

• Sizzler Embraces Customer Experience Competencies
• A Branding (Not) Lesson From KFC
• Starbucks Brews A Comeback With Purpose
• Customer Experience And The Zen Of Brands
• CMOs: Start Building (Real) Loyalty
• Brands Are Dying; Deal With It
• Marketing Lessons From An Ex-Marine
• Wells Fargo Improves Communications With Ethnography
• My First 8 Steps As A New CMO
• Ford (Finally) Turns Employees Into Brand Ambassadors
• Lessons From Miller (Not So) Genuine Draft
• The 6 Gaps Between Intentions And Reality
• Chase Can’t Advertise Its Way To Customer Friendliness
• Firms Need Some Soul Searching

The bottom line: Your brand is too important to leave to chance.