So how does an organisation manage its customer experience to ensure its people, processes and culture are reinforcing customer expectations? A key foundation of customer experience management is internal branding.

Internal branding in essence is ‘living’ and ‘delivering on’ your organisation’s brand promises. It is an organisation-wide initiative that enables all employees to understand how they can personally impact on a customer’s experience and contribute to building the company’s reputation and brand.

Many organisations fall into the trap of developing an advertising strategy with the intention of communicating how wonderful and customer-centric the organisation is. While the advertising direction may be in-line with the organisation’s brand, where it falls down is where what is being promoted is not being delivered.

The result of this is that both customers and employees are disconnected with the organisation, as UK oil company Total experienced. The company ran an ad campaign featuring the perfect employee called Steve who spends his time running around helping customers with heavy loads, childcare and car maintenance with the tagline ‘You’ll find people like Steve at all of our service stations’. The company did not reinforce this customer expectation with training and additional support to help employees, leaving both the employee and the customer frustrated and disappointed.

Internal branding today is all about connecting employees with an organisation’s brand and ensuring the internal brand experience is authentic. Just ask one of the 46,000 employees of The Dow Chemical Co. about the authenticity of their internal brand. They will most likely point you to the ‘I Am the Human Element’- an internal campaign which celebrates the contributions and successes of their employees, helping the organisation achieve its vision.

FedEx is another example of an organisation that has focused on building a strong internal brand and as a result is considered one of the world’s most admired companies and trusted employers. The company’s workforce not only know and believe in the values instilled by their ‘People-Service-Profit’ internal brand, but they can cite chapter and verse the actions they and others have taken to deliver the FedEx brand and what it means to them. This level of employee engagement delivers significant benefit to FedEx in terms of high performance and strong profits.

So perhaps it is time to consider the benefit to your organisation of building a strong internal brand. Recent transitional times with a turnover of employees, changing management styles or the merging of departments may have had more of an impact on your internal brand than you realise.

Reinvigorate your employees on what your organisation stands for and build passion for your brand promise. Not only will you reconnect with your employees and improve engagement but you will also reconnect with your customers and improve profitability.

The definition of brand needs to go one step deeper because those attributes that make a product or company stand out from others stems from something beyond image and below the surface of what we see – that part of the iceberg that lays underneath the waterline.  These are normally considered core values.  That is, those values that help us create a relationship with products, services and companies so we then grow to know and trust them.

The lines between image and brand were recently blurred when QANTAS launched a campaign over Twitter asking customers what their dream luxury in-flight experience would be.  Whether the timing of this campaign was intentional or not, QANTAS customers used the medium as a platform to comment on the airlines current operational and industrial dispute issues.  The attempt to garner some support and goodwill towards the company was entirely misdirected.  Instead of creating a polished image of QANTAS the campaign really exacerbated the internal issues and drew attention away from QANTAS’ key brand message.  Evidently, this exercise has been dubbed “the Hindenburg of social media” but goes to show that when something is not right at your core, where your brand draws its meaning from, then no amount of “image polishing” that can fix it.

Another example of how image and brand are interrelated is shown in the current plight of Kyle Sandilands.  Love him or hate his brand message is about sensationalism and as such in his need to be “sensational” he can go very awry.  His recent public outburst cost Austereo 60% of their sponsors which estimated to be worth $8 million.  The bankable image of the man has truly tanked and we are seeing glimpses of what he truly values.  It was reported that Holden was the first sponsor to leave Austereo citing disconnect in values of the shows and the Holden brand.  Next to follow were The Good Guys.  What sponsors are starting to see is Kyle Sandilands brand, and values. Sponsors are then making judgement calls on whether his brand is congruent with theirs.

So whereas QANTAS tried to use a competition campaign to polish its image in an attempt to gloss over what was happening in the company on an operational level, the sentiment felt by its customers did not change – customers wanted more.  How was QANTAS going to address the issues the company faces whilst still being “the spirit of Australia.  The opposite occurred with Kyle Sandilands.  His real and overtly sensational self bubbled to the surface from his core and tarnished his incredibly bankable image.  These examples highlight the very tenuous but also very real link between image and brand because really the two cannot be separated; your brand is your image is your brand….

Historically, the Qantas brand has been built on a solid foundation with a mix of two things: safety and reliability, as well as being Australia’s friendly ambassador to the world. Qantas’ positioning on safety and reliability comes from its extraordinary track record, also famously plugged as the world’s best in the Oscar-winning movie Rain Man: “QANTAS…QANTAS never crashed”. Qantas’ long-standing ambassador role harks back to its first overseas passenger flight from Darwin to Singapore in 1935. Since then, it has consistently reinforced that status by stirring feelings of patriotism: the use of the Flying Kangaroo logo in 1947 and the ‘Spirit of Australia’ slogan, the use of emotive advertising featuring sweeping shots of iconic Australian tourist attractions, the co-branded marketing campaigns with Tourism Australia (more recently Oprah and John Travolta).

Today however, the Qantas brand operates in a significantly different landscape, which in turn raises questions about whether it can still rely on the same brand associations and positioning. Whilst safety and reliability are sine qua non for the airline industry, perhaps air travel has become so pervasive that amongst well-known brands, safety and reliability are assumed to be a given or must-have (as industrial psychologist Herzberg would term it ‘hygiene’ factor) and may no longer constitute a point of difference. Volvo and safety worked well for a while; but for Mercedes Benz, prestige and performance are its selling points because their customers who look for those things largely assume that they are also getting safety as a standard. Similarly, Singapore Airlines has been consistently profitable by positioning its unique service experience, not because it screams “safety and reliability” in its advertising.

Recent events may have also changed public perception of Qantas’ positioning on safety and reliability. Recurring grievances and industrial action by Qantas engineers and maintenance personnel may have created lingering concerns about aircraft operating fitness. Even if regulators ensure that unsafe aircrafts do not take off, what will delays and cancellations do to an airline’s reputation for reliability? A scan of social media revealed that there is substantial chatter voicing concerns about Qantas’ safety standards, and with the speed at which negative word-of-mouth spreads in social networks, every minor issue now would be magnified and widely disseminated.

Increasingly, Qantas may also be perceived to be less Australian in spirit. Recent negative publicity about exorbitant executive pay smacks of corporate greed of Wall Street proportions. The spirit of giving executives a 70% pay rise while outsourcing operations to Southeast Asia would be perceived as fairly un-Australian. In fact, concerns about safety, reliability, and outsourced are linked: a recent survey of investors and shareholders revealed that 55% believe that outsourcing is the cause of many of its midair incidents. One could see that it would be slightly hypocritical to continue to capitalise on feelings of national pride among local consumers when a company is moving operations offshore because it no longer wants to pay national-average wages to its local workers. It may only be a matter of time when it strikes passengers that an Irish-led, part-British-owned airline can only control Australian skies for so long….until the next viable option comes around.

The branding challenges for Qantas are not straightforward, yet not insurmountable. Two of Qantas’ brand pillars, which have served its domestic and international markets quite well thus far, are weakening and the airlines is left scrambling trying to reinforce the same brand pillars with band-aids and PR spin. The domestic market may be forgiving because we are Australians (and we really don’t have a choice), but the international market is much less so. How will Jetstar and Red Q compete in the already-competitive Asian market? What will their respective brand equities look like when it can no longer rely on the endorsement of a once-strong parent brand? Building brand equity requires insights about what will make the brand differentiable and sustainable.

In the previous blog (posted 12^th August, 2011), the position was taken that it is the uniqueness of data that can provide quality insights that help establish a sustainable competitive advantage; but in saying this, the unique data needs to be matched by quality analysis. However this raises the question of how data can be “unique”? Should you look for the hard, quantifiable and crunchable analytics or the more “soft touch” that is afforded with qualitative data?

In another Harvard Business Review blog entitled, “You can’t analyse your way to growth” (12 September, 2011), Roger Martin argues the need to separate “analysis from appreciation”. By his definition, analysis is basically crunching the readily available data to make assumptions about and extrapolate into the future. The problem being this data is usually historical and fails to provide insight into new opportunities that can grow your organisation. By contrast, appreciation is the qualitative side of data. This data is regarded as being more in tune with your customers, basically putting yourself in their shoes and having a deep “appreciation” for their lives. How you capture this data relates to understanding how your customer uses or interacts with your product and service – what makes it easy, what makes it hard, is it enjoyable and fun or tedious and difficult. It is from having this appreciation that Roger Martin believes opportunities will present themselves because you can imagine new possibilities that did not previously exit.

The blog cites some great examples from Procter & Gamble which shows how being in tune and close to your customers can present great opportunities for growth. The product Febreeze was born from the company having an appreciation for consumers. The market for air fresheners was only showing minimal growth and the product simply “masked” odours. Having an appreciation for the needs of consumers P&G understood that air fresheners fell short of expectations; where users would prefer a product that eliminates odours. Out of having that appreciation, Frebreeze was developed and the product produced tremendous growth and profit for P&G.

In this instance, the unique data that is needed to provide quality insights is captured by having an intimate and deep appreciation for the lives of your consumers – how they interact and use your product is vital to understanding where new growth opportunities lie and maintaining your sustainable competitive advantage. However, it is also the analyst, with their qualitative proficiency, that could identify the expectation versus performance gap, like in the case of Frebreeze, which created a new growth trajectory for P&G. So is it data or analysis? The debate continues.

Taking this further many organisations appoint brand ambassadors or spokespeople that represent the attributes that they would like consumers to associate with their product or organisation. A good example of this was Gillette who associated themselves with the world’s best performing athletes. In 2009 Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Thierry Henry were Gillette’s global ambassadors. Securing these three ambassadors cost Gillette millions!

The strategy was simple Gillette wanted to have their brand associated with the world’s best performing athletes, they wanted to be viewed as the best performing, clean cut, international, multi-racial, multi-sport, global superstars. Through association many of the characteristics of the brand ambassadors were projected onto their products. As the tag line stated “Gillette the best a man can get”

This approach works wonderfully well when your ambassadors are viewed positively. It is however a two edged sword. Interestingly, two of three global ambassadors for Gillette fell from grace within a very short period of time. Tiger Woods ran into a fire hydrant outside his home and was soon exposed as a sex obsessed philander. Weeks later Thierry Henry found himself in the center of a storm of negative publicity after using his left hand – his shaving hand – to illegally propel France into the World Cup Finals.

Using an ambassador to endorse your product is not without risk and the Gillette experience highlights how closely aligned a brand’s fortunes are to their chosen ambassador.

Very recently we have had situations where undesirable people (people not chosen as ambassadors) have decided to support, wear or endorse a company’s brand.  In the USA Abercrombie & Fitch (a popular clothing brand) have offered to pay the cast of “Jersey Shore” to stop wearing their clothes on their television show.

The clothing company says in a news release that it’s concerned that having the people on this television program seen wearing its clothing could cause “significant damage” to the company’s image.

This kind of unwanted endorsement potentially creates an entire new revenue stream for people of undesirable profile. Mangers may well exploit their client’s negative image and deliberately associate them with desirable brands. It is entirely possible that we may well see more people being paid not to associate with brands than people paid for their positive endorsement.

Social media and reality television mean that there will be more people with negative images who will enjoy their 15minutes of fame. Having an undesirable brand ambassador attach themselves to your brand creates a raft of new issues for you and your brand.

The question is whether Volvo is appropriately consolidating its brand equity as a “safety” oriented brand, by representing afresh as edgy, sleek, and target to the luxury oriented customer.  Arguably this has the potential to undermine such established brand equity, and Volvo must prove the credibility of such a strategic change to espouse what are clearly different organisation visions and values.

Clearly the change in ownership has triggered and driven this new strategic direction. However this story goes a little deeper than just a change in brand meaning.  What lie’s at its heart is two competing visions of the future held by the different stakeholders.  On one hand there is the current CEO and his belief that Volvo should continue to dominate the safety and fuel-efficient position it has held for a long time.  On the other there are the new owners who see a potential for Volvo to compete in the luxury car space against already well-known and established brands like BMW, Mercedes and Audi.

The importance of having a concise and definitive company vision has been well documented.  A vision of a desired future state is essential in any strategic transformation; this was advocated by Harvard Professor John Kotter and is a lesson to be examined in Volvo’s case.  In Kotter’s article, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail” (HBR, January, 2007) he proposes eight errors that make a change effort unsuccessful.  The most important take-away for this Volvo case is “Error 3 – Lacking a Vision”, or as it is in this case the lack of a concise, directive vision.  The two leaders at Volvo had competing views on the direction of the Volvo brand, the choice of “stick to your knitting” or compete in a new luxury market.

This situation may be a warning sign for the two leaders at Volvo that it is time to meet on common ground about where Volvo needs to be in the future; especially if the brand wishes to stay the leader in the family-friendly space whilst being an effective competitor in the luxury space. Here, Kotter would argue that Volvo needs a sensible vision that develops a picture of the future the brand wishes to achieve.  Without this vision any initiatives can easily dissolve into lacklustre efforts and take Volvo in the wrong direction or nowhere at all.

A company’s vision, therefore, should not be underestimated. In the case of Volvo, what does it signal to customers and the market that its leaders cannot agree on the brands direction, and what does it signal to Volvo’s employee’s who will be instrumental in driving the brands direction? A fractured vision will only mean a fractured workforce which is not a desired state to be in.

In his recently published book “The Dumbing Down of Politics” Lindsay Tanner explains that political leaders are now obsessed with achieving media exposure. He goes on to explain that serious political debate about the big issues is being lost in a political sideshow that is more concerned with appearances than substance. In essence many political parties are now poorly positioned as brands. Brands actually stand for something – many political parties do not.

Lindsay Tanner explains “Politicians are now so desperate to get media coverage at almost any cost that they willingly participate in entertainment formats that have little connection to any political issue.” This media sideshow contributes towards the substance of political parties being lost.

A party’s position on an issue is often influenced by the outcomes of focus groups rather than deeply held political conviction. Adopting a popular position based upon the outcomes of a focus group means that as public opinion changes politicians regularly need to change their policy. This is not leadership – rather it is the” tail wagging the dog”. This approach drives the increasingly held belief that politicians primary agenda is to attend to what will get them elected at the next election.

Mark Latham explains that “politics has evolved into a long-running TV show, whereby its senior players gear their daily schedules, not around matters of public policy and governance, but the quest to have their comments . . . replayed on the nightly news”.

George Megalogenis argues that: “To a visitor from outer space, it would be hard to distinguish the job description of prime minister from that of a talk show or game show host.” In essence the quest to win the ratings war directly influences the activities of politicians and they invest more time, energy and effort into this agenda than they do into the serious political debate.

Neil Postman suggests that “cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control”. Much public perception is now influenced by appearance and superficiality. Substance is often disregarded because of the way someone looks or the way that they present their ideas.

Political parties are not unique; many organizations focus more on style than substance. These organisations invest millions of dollars in fantastic looking television advertising, great websites and flashy premises; meanwhile their people lack a common vision and purpose. Great organizations understand that deeply held beliefs and values combined with a common vision are the drivers of long term success. Substance is critical to creating a strong brand. Political parties are no different!

A recent Harvard Business Review blog titled, Create Brand Superfans (12/05/11) author Matthew Rhoden discusses the importance of distinguishing customers that are brand promoters (or advocates) from customers that are simply satisfied or loyal. A brand promoter will support the brand even during times of criticism and difficulty, and go out of their way to correct statements that are factually incorrect. A brand promoter will share their experiences and praise the brand wherever they can, whilst also providing feedback on service and quality. Lastly a promoter is also emotionally attached to the brand. It forms part of their inner circle and permeates into many parts of the promoter’s social life.

The question for any organisation is how can we turn customers into brand promoters? The blog suggested three strategies that could be considered. Firstly, silence detractors by identifying those customers that have a higher level of negativity and allocate resources to fix the issues, thereby creating an environment where customers will not want to speak badly of your brand. Secondly, build positive experiences for you customers through having consistent and coordinated interactions across all channels that focus on meeting the needs of your customers. Thirdly, go that extra mile for your customers especially when they least expect it and you will have them as a long-term customer. For customers to truly become a promoter of your brand a high level of engagement must already exist and customers need to feel emotionally connected with your brand.

Many organisations embracing customers as brand promoters have been able to measure their progress using a Net Promoter Score (NPS). Essentially, you ask a customer to rate your brand on a scale one to ten. Customers who give a 9 and 10 are your “promoters”, 6 or below are your “detractors” and 7 and 8 are your ambivalent customers. By subtracting all the 6 or below scores from the 9 and 10 scores you can determine you your Net Promoter Score. Consumer electronics company, Philips, has been employing NPS since 2006. In another Harvard Business Review blog titled, How Philips Uses Net Promoter Scores to Understand Customers (10/05/11), it discusses how using NPS has helped Philips become an “outside-in”, customer-focused company by organising themselves around the needs and expectations of their customers. Customers of Philips wanted products and services that surpassed simple feature-rich and technologically advanced qualities, so Philips needed to create unexceptional positive experiences at all customer touch-points if they were to see improvements in their NPS.

As companies become more customer-focused and organise themselves around meeting needs of customer segments, Net Promoter Scores will gain greater credence. NPS is a useful and effective tool for measuring a brands success and organisations should place a greater emphasis on creating and holding on to customers who are their brand promoters.

As a customer of a major Australian Telco I recently spent 3 hours on the phone to a gentleman in India called Raj and by the end of the conversation I was no closer to getting my issues resolved. His English was ordinary his product knowledge almost non-existent, worse still he had no understanding of how important my broadband is to me. By the end of the conversation the Telco’s brand had been damaged beyond repair.  There is no doubt the Telco had saved money by outsourcing the service in the short term but what about the long term?

The reality is that most customers have very few issues with their telecommunications provider. The only real interaction the majority of customers will have is when something goes wrong.  It is when something goes wrong that the Organisations have a chance to prove themselves. As a long term customer I was expecting the organisation to deliver on their positioning line or brand promise of “making life easier”

I can assure you that my friend in India did nothing to make my life easier, on the contrary after 3 hours on the phone and a still unresolved issue with my broadband I was ready to tell everyone that would listen my unprompted opinions of the Telco in a very frank and forthright manner.

All organisations will have things go wrong, no Organisation is perfect. It is when things go wrong that your customers find out what your Organisation really stands for. A helpline is a very important touch point for a stressed customer. It is these moments that will define a customer’s ongoing relationship with an Organisation or a brand. If your Organisation exceeds your client’s expectations in their hour of need you probably have a customer for life.

Conversely, if you disappoint your customer in their hour of need you are providing them with the trigger to switch providers. The reality is that you will lose business and some customers will never return. It is at these critical moments that your brand is defined in the eyes of your customers.

You can also rely on the fact that for each customer that you disappoint they will tell many others, and the speed at which their disappointment can be shared is unprecedented.  The use of Social Media means that a single adverse customer experience can be shared with thousands of people within minutes.

Organisations should, understand the lifetime value (LTV) of their existing customers, and ensure that they have considered the potential impact of negative customer experiences before they make the decision to outsource overseas.

Saving money on outsourcing in the short term could cost you a fortune in the long run.

In his video blog, Umair Haque talks about brands as fitting into three evolving categories. Firstly, brands started out as being functional. This means their purpose was to assist consumers understand what an organisation provided in terms of their product or service offering.  This is brand at its most fundamental level – brand as a communicator of function.

Following functionality, brands evolved to something we aspire to. Luxury brands are champions of this. They create brands that we all aspire to be associated with.  Think about the images portrayed by brands like Porsche or Dior. This is because these brands are linked to status which feeds into our own self-concept and esteem, so when we consume these products we generally feel better about ourselves.  However, the research conduct by Umair indicated that consumers are becoming more detached and indifferent to aspirational brands in general.  We as consumers are no longer being inspired by brands nor do we feel any emotional connection with them.

From this research, Umair contends that brands need to reinvent themselves as being more meaningful.  This effectively means brands need to find a way to matter to consumers in human terms.  Organisations and their brands need to move away from a single economic value-creation focus to also focus on emotional value-creation. This emotional value represents the extent to which a brand can come to mean something special to certain consumers.  Moreover, brands that do resonate more with consumers often share similar interests and experiences.  For example Nike has developed an online community called Nike Plus, where consumers can track, share, train and learn about running techniques and exercises that improve fitness levels.  In creating Nike Plus, Nike has managed to permeate into other areas of a consumer’s personal life and create a more meaningful interaction with the Nike brand and its consumers.  Adidas has followed a similar strategy by developing the miCoach mobile application which offers consumers personalised training tools.  The application has so far been downloaded over one million times.

Another example how organisations and brands have been able to become more meaningful to consumers is by tapping into the sentiment around sustainability and “greening”.  For example, Nike, Wal-Mart and Target have teamed up in a wide ranging effort to jointly enhance green standards in the clothing and footwear industry.  Nike has gone further to establish the Nike Environmental Apparel Design Tool which assess the ecological footprint of potential product launches.  These actions signal to consumers that brands, like Nike, care about the concerns of their consumers that affect them on a personal level.

To create greater meaning, organisations and their brands need to garner further insight into their consumer’s everyday lives, not just the part that involves the use of the brand’s product or service.  Specifically, this means knowing what is important in their lives, what they enjoy doing and what they spend their time on.  Knowing this means you better understand the relevance these have in consumer’s lives which, in turn, creates opportunities to strengthen brand associations.  Nike and Adidas have explored ways in which their products can have a greater meaning by associating their brands to consumers need for fitness, healthier lifestyles and general well-being.  The outcome being these brands now takes on greater meaning.