Branding and Customer Service

I was shopping today. I was in a fabric store putting together a project and the store was understaffed and under trained. They complained about their hours and their environment. Similarly I was out dining in San Francisco last night, not wanting to shout out the restaurant, suffice to say, it was expensive and had a water view. The waitress was untrained and belonged in a Denny's, similarly complained about her job.

These businesses go to all of this expense to re-model their environments, to advertise, to charge top dollar and then they serve up mediocre to bad service.

Branding does not stop at the logo and the color scheme. You only need to visit Disneyland once to understand what branding is. It is an experience from the word go. Walt created the experience with everything from the characters coming to life to the perfectly swept sidewalks. Nothing was left out of the experience of being in the Kingdom of Disney.

People enter your website, your store, your product and they expect an experience and leave with an imprint, a feeling. That is a big part of branding that businesses forget to offer.

I was at a Christmas party a few years ago and all of the girls were into 'American Dolls'. One of the mom's went on and on about how I HAD to order the doll, just to experience the customer service. She went on to say, if the doll breaks they not only take it back and fix it, but it arrives with a sling and a note. That is customer service that gets the viral buzz.

Differentiator

We're better? We're Faster? We have better customer service? I get that initially a lot when I talk to customers about brand differentiators. This is a hard topic because let's face it your competition wouldn't be your competition if you didn't offer a very similar thing. Reeling down the billion bullet points of assets doesn't make you better.

Brand differentiators is, to me, a bit more about the niche and who you are talking to and the personality you are putting on the brand.

In a recent CRM Software brand that I worked with, it was important for me to go through my 'Visual Catalyst' process. In so doing I got the personality of the developers, their vision of the company moving forward and the position in the market began to take hold visually and with words.

They have many of the same benefits and tools as the competition, the price is pretty close, they have flexibility to be reconfigured for the customers needs.
So-- it had to come down to branding. They care about the business of Non-Profits. They live and breath it. They share the same values as the customers that they are reaching out to and they really really want to make them successful.

So we used that. We built the campaign around that. I can't go into detail until their new website goes live. I can't discuss the business model and how we tweaked it to fit with the strategy. But, it set them apart from the competition. Without a bunch of bullet points.