Reasons why your Brand Experience may not be what you think it is

Chapter 2, Part 5 - Corporate Brand Personality

Here are some questions to consider to help assess if your organization is addressing all angles of your brand reputation:

 1.             Do you invest proportionate amounts of resource in the hard element of your corporate brand (advertising, sponsorship, logos etc), and the softer people behaviour elements? Is the weighting justified?

 2.             Do you truly know where your most valuable customer touch-points are and maximize their impact?

3.             Do you effectively measure how your customers and suppliers feel about their complete brand experience with you?

4.             What measures do you have in place to ensure that your managers and staff are fully engaged with the values and portraying them through their behaviours every day?

5.             Are you gaining enough feedback from customers and stakeholders in parts of your business where third parties are involved?

 6.             Are you checking how 3rd parties and sub-contractors are representing your brand? Do they feel a part of your brand?

 7.             Are you encouraging a feedback culture? 

8.             If you’re gaining all the feedback, what are you doing with it? 

9.             Have you considered a reward system for providing great stakeholder experience?

 10.          Is social media impact being effectively monitored, measured, and acted upon?

 Recognizing the value of feedback

Question 8 – about what you’re doing with the feedback - is crucial. How many times have you completed a survey as a consumer or client with negative comments and yet have received no follow-up to gain more information from you?  What an opportunity missed by the company to fully understand where the customer experience is not on message, to put measures in place to correct it and ultimately create the experience that gets talked about for positive reasons.

 I recently went to great lengths to provide constructive feedback for a house rental agency I used. In fact, they persisted in sending me the questionnaire to complete. The service I had received was far from acceptable and professional, and I felt it would be useful, notwithstanding my limited free time, to give the company accurate feedback so they could look into where they can improve. My feedback was wide open to and I even offered to discuss it more with them; but yes you’ve guessed, not even an acknowledgement let alone a follow-up call was forthcoming. I can only assume that companies like this are ignorant of the fact that this level of apathy will result in losing customers today on a bigger scale than ever before due to the spread of the negative messages quicker than they can imagine. In fact, this level of service I have found is consistent in the estate and rental agency business in the United Kingdom in particular. So, if you manage a business in this area, please seize the opportunity to stand out from your competitors and change the unfortunate stereotype image of this industry.

Communication is king

Perhaps today the phrase ‘communication is king’ is as important as ‘the customer is king’ was a few years ago (and is still considered so by some). However, the focus has shifted – if we get all the channels of communication in alignment with the brand messages, then ultimately the customer will benefit anyway. Richard Branson is well known for saying he puts staff first above the customer. He believes that if you treat your staff well, they are happy and therefore will create better experiences for your customers. Similarly, one unhappy employee can ruin the brand experience for not just one, but for numerous customers.

Simple really, and of course it appears to work for Virgin. Branson has said he can’t believe more companies don’t operate in this way.

 In an interview for my book Walking TALL he told me,  ‘If the person who works at your company is not appreciated, they are not going to do things with a smile’. In not treating employees well, companies risk losing customers over bad service. With this in mind, Branson says he has made sure that Virgin prioritizes employees first, customers second, and shareholders third.

‘Effectively, in the end shareholders do well, the customers do better, and your staff remains happy, ‘he says.

What Branson is effectively saying here is that if your staff are communicated with well, understand the values of the company clearly, are valued and respected, then you get the best attitude from them, that gets passed onto your customers.  We now live in an age where communication and interaction between managers, the leadership team and employees is of paramount importance to success. Effective communication strengthens the connection between a company and all of its stakeholders - those people affected in some way by the company’s actions: customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, and the community. When communication breaks down, the results can be anything from time wasting to disastrous.

I found with our Walking TALL research with managers and directors in large organizations, that sadly communication levels and standards are decreasing, often resulting in an environment of mistrust and ambiguity.  If people are not communicated with effectively, meaning that they don’t interpret the message in the way the person delivering it intended, then messages are left wide open to misperception. For example, we found that people are taking longer to respond to emails – this can either be interpreted as ‘not having got the message’, ‘can’t be bothered to reply to the message’, ‘don’t have the answer to the message’ or perhaps ‘you’re not important enough for me to respond to and I’m too busy anyway’.  Any of these could be correct but we have no way of knowing which one. We start to resent the person for not responding and a natural reaction then is to start behaving in the same way and not respond to their messages promptly. This is what quickly creates a culture of bad corporate manners.

Good Leaders, Good Communicators

The best leaders inspire their teams through clear communication, and the best organizations promote brand alignment, as well as respect and accountability with clear communication. In business leadership, I’m a great believer in, ‘communication, communication, communication’, and this doesn’t mean of course, longer or more communication; rather clearer, more succinct, and meaningful communication.  It makes no difference whether it’s business, sport or politics; the best leaders are those who are the best communicators in all forms. They have strong values and are transparent with those values. Their teams look up to them and are inspired by them. If you want to achieve the maximum buy-in to your corporate brand, then you need to master your corporate communication.

Individuals in your teams want to feel pride in the company they work for and the leaders they work with and represent. Phil Jones, managing director of Brother UK Limited, has managed his personal brand well and made a name for himself as a speaker and thought-leader in the future of leadership. This has made him more visible in his role, inside and outside of the Brother UK business. He believes: ‘We have entered an era of leadership where there is a shift from power to influence. By me speaking and attending events I have the opportunity to communicate the brand of Brother UK so much more’.  This of course also communicates strong and clear messages to his employees and gives them a sense of pride in their CEO.

In summary, we have looked at the various ways in which your brand can be strongly represented by methods and means that are not necessarily the obvious ones.  As we move into an era that is focused on the total customer experience and how a company makes us feel as consumers and suppliers, or indeed employees, I would recommend putting together a specific plan of action to assess these areas of your business. This should look at how you might be leaking brand investment, as well as the opportunities to make a significant difference to the impact your brand has on all your stakeholders.  In Chapter 3, I will be looking specifically at how you make your employees feel about you as a company and how we can tighten and heighten Employee and Employer Brand with personal branding in mind. 

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Copyright Lesley Everett 2024