I was recently reintroduced to a great definition of branding (thanks, Lisa). The best-selling author Seth Godin wrote “a brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a customer or client’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” This provides a bit of a framework that one can use to evaluate the strength of your brand, how you think about your brand building activities, and how you track and measure success of your business.
Expectations: the standard to which your brand is measured
Expectations can take many forms and can come from multiple directions. They can be set when a customer or potential customers sees your advertisements, hears a warranty claim, or is told about a product or service by a trusted colleague or friend. Sometimes expectations are set by competitors or by those performing services in other industries that raise customer requirements. Managing expectations is a key contributor to all successes. The dynamics of expectations exist in personal relationships and shows in company stock prices. The same holds true for companies wishing to build a brand. Understanding the expectations and requirements of the customer is critical. As Clayton Christensen said in his “theory of jobs to be done”:
When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, the next time we're confronted with the same problem, we hire the product again. If it does a crummy job, we "fire" it and we look for an alternative.
The evaluation of the product as being well-suited for the job or “crummy” can be expressed as the ratio of how well the product actually performed as compared to how well it was expected to perform.
When I helped grow the desktop monitor business back in the early days of flat panels, we offered an industry-leading 3-year warranty with 2-day advanced replacement. Something we eventually named the “Customer First” warranty. Unheard of in the industry, but it immediately built trust for an unknown brand in a new category of product that few had purchased yet. It contributed to a fast growing and sustainable business. Sometimes, as the authors Eddie Yoon and Christopher Lochhead propose, “first mover advantage” goes not to the original innovator or even the company first to market, but to the one who understands their customer best and creates the category.
So, ask yourself how well do you know the expectations of your customers? What is the problem they are trying to solve? How well do you solve it (in their evaluation, not yours)? Who in your industry “owns” the standard for expectations for your product or service? Who is setting the standard for quality, delivery, and performance that are now table stakes in your industry? What can you do to set customer expectations higher in a place where you are better suited to deliver than others? How can you fashion a warranty or service pledge that sets the bar? How do you measure customer satisfaction and is it truly capturing the expectations of your customers? Are there some unfulfilled expectations in your category, or in other industries, that you could uniquely address for your customers?
Memories: the impressions your brand leaves behind
Memories of your brand are centered in the customer experience. User experience (UX), often manifested in user interfaces (UI), or the larger field of customer experience (CX) has been of growing interest to companies and is seen as a key differentiator to those who do it well. But memories are experiences reflected upon. The American philosopher and educational reformer, John Dewey, once said, “we do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” Experiences must be harvested for insights for true learning or change to occur. Memories of brand interactions is what builds your brand and shared memories build your reputation.
Because memories are not facts, you can frame how people remember. When online retailing start, the idea of returning a product through the mail was a hassle. Companies thought of returns as a necessary evil of doing business. Then came disrupters. Nordstrom is said to have allowed a return of tires (even though they don’t sell tires). Zappos, the online footwear retailer bought by Amazon, likes to say they were a “customer service company that happened to sell shoes” and offered free returns from the start. This was deemed genius. They created a customer by making it possible to comfortably buying a personal product like shoes over the internet. Even though some people would buy two sizes to send back one, most still viewed returns as something to avoid. Returns were still reverse logistics. Today, there are companies like StitchFix (personalized styling) and Warby Parker (prescription eyewear) that rely on returns as an expected part of their business model. This reframing, enabled by data, is where business model innovation lies.
What do you do to measure the experience that people have with your product or services? Is there anything negative in their perception that might be reframed to solve a customer pain point? What is their experience with you before they use your product or service in the sales or marketing processes of your company? What is their experience after they use the product as they seek out service, support, or higher utilization? How do your customers describe their interactions with your brand after the fact, when they are recommending you to a friend, or warning a friend never to use your product? Where did they experience frustration or a feeling of success? What emotions are associated with your product or service? How to you measure the weight of a memory?
Stories: how your brand lives forever
Stories are powerful. The stories brands tell about themselves, or more importantly about their customers, can have a meaningful impact. Brands build trust by talking about their history of innovation or featuring case studies from other respected brands. But even more powerful is the role that your brand plays in the stories of your customer. A customer holding a Starbucks cup is not telling the a story about a coffee grower or roaster. It might be part of a larger narrative where a person is hard-working, prosperous, and deserving of a personalized reward like a tall, double, non-fat, caramel latte. Wearing Nike shoes might not just support their arches on the track, but reflect their belief in personal achievement or social justice. The old adage “no one gets fired for buying an IBM,” spoke to the trust that the brand built among corporations. It was the story individuals would tell about themselves when they, too, bought an IBM and were part of the club of insiders who knew best.
You might think you are in the business of synthesizing chemicals, renting hotel rooms, or decorating cupcakes, but to your customers, your brand might very well be a prop or a setting of their own unfolding story. Your product might compete with other categories in fulfilling the emotional needs of your customers. Does expertly navigating through the city with Waze have the same emotional payback as getting unique access to a concert because you hold a premium Mastercard account? Is your service contract helping your customer qualify for a promotion? Your product could not just be something they use or something they do, but it reflects on who they are. This is where contextual insights are so important.
What do customers do immediately before and after using your product or service? How does their choice of brand affect their self-worth or the perceptions of others? What other products or offering might fulfill the same emotional job as your product, but in another category and what can you learn from them? What emotions arise when customers tell others about your brand? Where else do these emotions show up? What else can your customer do because they are using your product or service? Do you need to add new kinds of research, like ethnographic studies, to your toolbox to contextualize your customer’s buying journey for new insights?
Relationships: how your brand becomes personal
Relationships are important in all industries and business categories. Sometimes the relationship is with a person: the account manager whom they consult with and trust, the executive who they admire, or with the counter clerk who knows that they like extra cream cheese on their bagel. Some leaders, of companies big and small, are the manifestation of their brand (or perhaps their companies are the manifestations of their personalities). These human relationships are influenced by corporate culture, the language and customs of your social environment, and the mechanisms of conversations and human interaction. And for the purposes of branding, relationships can be defined broadly at all the critical touchpoints.
A family favorite movie from my childhood was “The Music Man.” In it, the little town of Gary, Indiana waits with bated breath as the Wells Fargo wagon approaches. It carries important necessities. And, more perhaps more importantly, it contains the mystery and delight of wonders of far-off lands. Raisins from Fresno, grapefruit from Tampa, and salmon from Seattle. Even a canon for the courtyard square. As was moistly sung by a young Ron Howard, in that wagon “could be somethin’ special just for me.” I don’t remember them mentioning the name of the Wells Fargo wagon driver. The relationship was with the promise of the wagon (the same wagon, you will note, is still featured prominently in the Wells Fargo bank logo). The relationships that business-to-business sellers have with their customers can be so valuable that in mergers or acquisitions the key sales relationships are measured and secured with special stay-on incentives. In other industries, the relationships are more fungible and often scaled to objects or interfaces. The relationship with the brown uniform of a UPS driver or the highly-trained manners of a Chick-fil-A employee.
So, ask how would your customers describe the relationship they have with your employees? What other aspects of your business or touchpoints do customers think about in relational terms? Where, how, and with “whom” do they have conversations, make requests, or receive services? Who or what do they trust with their credit card number or identity? How do they invest in the relationship with your physical product or software tool? How do you measure engagement and loyalty? How do they engage with your brand communications, events, or other points of contact? How would you value or prioritize these relationships as they contribute to loyalty or customer lifetime value?
Customer Decision: the ultimate test
These dimensions of a brand are not mutually exclusive, of course. The relationship someone has with a software app is informed by the user experience, what they have come to expect, and makes memories that can be shared. In the combination is brand preference and loyalty.
For the famed musical, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda penned the following lyrics:
Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.
The same is true of your brand. You can decide which research and development projects you fund, what metrics you measure, and how you lead your organization, but you don’t get decide if your product or service achieves the glory you wished for it. You don’t get to decide how customers adopt or engage with your brand. Although you try, you don’t even control how people talk about you where it matters most. All those decisions are squarely in the hands of your customers. They are the ones making memories and telling stories. All you can do is to make it easier for them to craft good ones.
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.
Photo by Vitalis Hirschmann on Unsplash @hirschmann_photography.
