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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Dan Day
April - May 2009

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Employees Key to Enlivening Your Brand

We create the brand. We build the brand. We nurture the brand. We even like to say, “We live the brand.”

We hire über-smart branding, marketing and creative people to make all the right moves researching, building, packaging our message-our identity-for mass consumption. “The customers, they’ll come a-running,” one branding agency exec once said to me.

“OK, everyone, stand aside and look to the sky. It’s time to launch our brand!”

Thud.

What just happened?

When prospects saw our brand coming, they noticed. To some, it looked like other brands they’d seen, so they sensed no real difference between them. To others, it wasn’t needed at the time they saw it. The remaining prospects thought there might be some value in it for them, so they made contact. But what they found was an experience different than they’d expected, the one our well-crafted brand message told them they’d receive.

We fired off our brand-spanking-new brand, directly from the marketing minds and toward customers, completely over the heads of our employees, the same employees who understand and interact with our prospects (bread) and customers (butter) every single day.

Minneapolis-based branding expert Karl Speak tells us:

“A brand is a relationship. It is not a statement. It is not a matter of contrived image, or colorful packaging, or snappy slogans, or adding an artificial veneer to disguise the true nature of what’s within. In fact, a ‘branded’ relationship is a special type of relationship-one that involves the kind of trust that only happens when two people believe there is a direct connection between their value systems.”

Some brands-Apple, Coca-Cola, Harley-Davidson-have on their side coolness, tradition and customers who are truly passionate about the product. The rest of us are left to earn a living by building our brand one relationship at a time.

The employee-to-customer connection, in essence, becomes your brand. Your employees bring your brand to life, through the relationships they create and nurture.

Forget loyalty

How, then, do we gain loyal customers, when we don’t have the brand cache of Apple, Coke or Harley, nor their budgets?

First, forget the notion of creating loyalty. There’s no such thing, as evidenced by the fact that even the world’s top brands are scrambling to retain market share in this economy. Consumers are running toward the best value-loyalty be damned!

Customer engagement, however, is a different story. We can engage customers, earning the right to ask them to buy more, buy more often and buy differently. That engagement comes from the inside out, through the marketing army you have but may not realize exists: your employees.

Research by The Gallup Organization found that 80 percent of the market value of the average S&P 500 company is comprised of intangible assets: the brand, its customer base, innovation and talent of its employees.

Whether you have six or 600 people working for you, no other business has the same blend of individual styles, generations and cultures as your employee population. This unique mix is the DNA of your brand, your “unduplicatable differentiation” in your industry.

Gallup also found that companies with “engaged workgroups” had several advantages over those whose employees were not in tune with the brand. Its research showed those companies:

  • • Have a 2.6 times faster growth rate;
  • • Are 12 percent more profitable;
  • • Are 18 percent more productive (revenue per employee); and
  • • Have employees who are 51 percent more likely to stay.

Grow your brand through employee engagement, and all indications are you will grow your business. Here’s how:

Through customers’ eyes

See your brand through the eyes of customers. Spend a week looking at your company from customers’ point of view, to witness how they experience your brand. You can also ask someone “on the outside” to do this. In larger organizations, executives might be able to get away with “mystery shopping.”

Examine encounters your customers have with the employees and technology representing your company via e-mail, the Internet and off-line applications.

Start right at the reception area and move through the entire organization to the loading dock, then on-site at customer locations, if appropriate.

Give employees space

Next, look at your brand from your employees’ perspective. Does your workforce understand the brand? Gallup says only 43 percent of customer-facing employees in a broad range of sales and service industries strongly agree with the statement, “I know what my company stands for and what makes us different from the competition.” How do your employees respond?

Are they aligned with the values you want your company to be known for? Can they communicate meaningfully and effectively what makes your company different?

Then, a question for you: Do you give them space to represent your brand, in their own voice?

Ritz-Carlton employees (who are called “ladies and gentlemen”) can make decisions on behalf of customer goodwill that might actually cost the company money-without notifying superiors.

Are you willing to go that far? That is what’s required of a customer-focused brand.

Connect with customers

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of interactions every day between your employees and your customers. Make sure these “moments of impression” are strong enough to sustain your brand through this economy.

You build customer engagement (read: increased revenue and profits) through the relationships your employees have with your customers.

Employees will become “brandtenders,” marketing your company through every interaction, because they understand and are aligned to the brand, can communicate your brand message and are empowered to represent it in the marketplace.

Did you see the television commercials for Best Buy during the holidays? They featured employees of the company, reliving specific interactions with customers. Best Buy understands its brand and how engaged, empowered employees bring it to life.

There’s probably room for you to improve every interaction between a customer and an employee. Instead of launching your brand, launch those relationships.