American Airlines, Customer Service Ninjas, and the Power of a True Brand Story

The new American Airlines rebranding has received a lot of attention lately, much of it disproving the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad press.  In addition to their new logo – which I, in apparently contrarian mode, happen to like – there is new advertising, which is, to be generous, less than breakthrough (for a pithier appraisal, see Robert Passikoff’s commentary in Forbes).

The airlines press release proclaims “The ads, featuring both customers and employees, illustrate the important linkage between the knowledge American employees possess and how that knowledge aligns with the reasons people fly.”

Good thought, but the run-of-the-mill, introductory ad at least is self-congratulatory and company focused rather than being convincingly customer-centric.

Using Real Humans, But Missing their Real Humanity

While American’s new made up story did nothing to get me to look at them in a new way, an encounter with their true story did.  Last night, while scrambling to use American Advantage Miles to take a spring break vacation, a service rep, who asked to be identified only as Thomas F., not only went the extra mile, but seemed willing to make a round-the-world trip to get us what we needed.  He spent a generous amount of time on the phone, persisting despite the inherent challenge of our late booking, limited availability, our desire not to pay the exorbinant fees tacked on if flying their “partner” airlines,  and our need to get kids back into school on a timely basis.  This, mind you, was after my wife and I (OK, really just my wife) had spent countless hours online trying to work it out before ever calling.

To our surprise, American not only let us deal with a real human being, but an absolutely awesome one.  About 30 minutes into the adventure, when I could tell that every dead end only made Mr. F. more determined to see us through, I (the inveterate customer-service complainer) actually asked “How do you just keep going?”  His reply:  “At this point, it becomes a mission with me.”

If your Employees are On A Mission, Let the World Know

This unusally positive experience made me wonder why American had to get so grandiose in their brand positioning and the subsequent campaign. Why could they not tell their own true stories and connect human-to-human rather than corporation-to-public?

The answer, I think, is that big brands and their big agencies are still more comfortable with “story selling” than true story telling.  American and the big brand world at large would do well to strip away the self-importance, pretense and even the big production values to simply let their brand truth shine through.

A 3-Step Plan to Get from “Story Selling” to Powerful Brand Storytelling

1)  Listen to your customers. Really open up your ears. Brands typically pay for a lot of focus groups, surveys or even one-on-one interviews, but few manage to really hear and understand the feedback. Allow your researchers to tell you what’s really being said, not just what the organization has predetermined it wants to hear.  Then tailor your customer experience to that before you ever start worrying about logos or ads.

2)  Listen to your own people.  Apply the above to your own employees.  Continually. And provide them with both the invitation and the means to keep telling  you what’s really happening on the front lines. This will improve both your operations and communciations.

3)  Tell their story in human terms, not corporate or even ad speak.
“Change is in the air,” and “There’s something new in the air,” accompanied by corporate fantasy images of customers and employees looking longingly, lovingly up at airplanes, is generic advertising at best.  If you’re really hearing what employees and customers are saying, you’ll find a true brand voice, a convincing, human voice and a compelling, believable message.

New American Airlines Commercial:

“Doing extra work as a cog in an industrial system is a fool’s errand.” Seth Godin, to tiny cogs like you and me

Will arrogance – even inadvertent arrogance – undermine the value of social media?

Seth Godin is obviously a smart, successful guy, and a giant on the marketing, social media, business and others scenes.  I confess that, unlike much of the world, I have not read his books, but I follow his blog, which offers no opportunity for comment, so I will leave mine here.

Yesterday’s post was entitled “Do the (extra) work“.  I assume it is intended as an encouragement to all who labor on the leading edge of our brave new world, and the nearly 2000 people who’ve tweeted it in the past 24 hours appear to take it that way.

So, am I the only one who finds this arrogant and dismissive?

Fools vs. Visionaries
In the brief post, Godin seems to call ordinary workers fools, should they want to take pride in their labor. First he exhorts us all to “Get in early.  Sweep the floor without being asked. Especially when it’s not your turn.  Not because you want credit or reward. Because you can.”  Great.  I agree.  Find the satisfaction in work, any work, for yourself.  Find what my favorite preacher, Dr. Bryant M. Kirkland, often referred to as “the sacredness of all work.” Don’t let others define success for you, define it for yourself. But then Godin offers this:

“The industrialist wants to suck everything out of you. Doing extra work as a cog in an industrial system is a fool’s errand.  For the rest of us, the artist and the freelancer and the creator, we know that the privilege of doing the extra work is the work itself.”

The working man or woman as fool.  The creative, artistic, entrepreneurial visionary as enlightened being and altruistic miner of intrinsic value.  I hope this is not the contrast Godin actually intends, but it is the one he at least inadvertently, unmindfully offers (even as he ignores the fact that marketing and social media are their own huge “industrial” systems).

Is Social Media Becoming Too Full of Itself, Too Empty, or Both?
For those of us who know and follow Godin via social media, it raises this question: Is social media becoming too full of itself?  When anything becomes too full of itself, it starts to reveal its emptiness, in this case, a preference for easy aphorisms over well and fully considered insight.

I come out of the self-aggrandizing land of Big Agency Advertising, which continues to congratulate itself into irrelevance at Cannes, etcetera.  I worry that if social media, which loves to prattle on about the need for authenticity, openness and helpfulness, cannot also maintain a sense of self-aware humility, it, too, will fail as a valuable conduit of human-to-human connection, and just become one more means of mutual manipulation.

My well-tabbed copy of “Tell the Truth” shows that there’s much to discuss between these covers

A few years ago, comedian/social commentator Stephen Colbert coined the exceptionally apt phrase “truthiness” to describe the political/commercial/cultural corruption of the entire concept of telling the truth in America,  lampooning the growing preference given to opinion and feeling over fact.

In their relatively new – and, I believe, important – book “Tell the Truth:  Honesty is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool,”  Sue Unerman and Jonathan Salem Baskin take on the topic of truth and its absolute importance to marketing, offering this fairly optimistic conclusion:   “More and more marketers are turning away from easily constructed spin and digging deep in to the truth of their brands. We believe that in five years we’ll look back on the art of spin as an anachronism.”

While I can’t agree with their conclusion, I encourage everyone to read their often enlightening book (that light emanating from a number of good interview-based case histories), because I do agree with the statement that immediately follows it: “The truth is the future of successful advertising.”  In fact, I would expand that to read “Truth is the future of advertising – and the lack of it will be end of advertising.”

Signs of the End:  Surveys Predict the Adpocalypse
If you track the various trust-related surveys, you know that the trend is advertising trust is down.  Way down.  You can see it in Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages, and in Edelman’s Brand Trust Barometer.  The only way to change that direction is to build trust; and the only way to do that is to start by telling, and showing, the truth.  Unless we do that, start looking for advertising trust in the single digits – and also start looking for a new job.

Highlights of “Tell the Truth”
I’m glad to say that there are two many meaty issues raised by this book to be adequately condensed into a manageable review, but even a look at the table of contents will give you a good overview of their observations and recommendations:

The Case for Truth

Content

1. Acknowledge Reality
2. Deliver Real Change to Services and Company Structure
3. Take Consumers on the Brand Truth Journey with You
4. Enlist Third-Party Advocates

Context

1. Be close
2. Find a Truth Turning Point
3. Use Point-of-Action Media
4. Leverage Routine

 Note:   I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher after I commented, in another copyklatsch post, on an abstract of it. I have no financial or other material interest in the book.

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING 
Review of “Tell the Truth:  Honesty is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool”
Branding Magazine

How simplicity lets your brand truth speak for itself.

Siegel+Gale, a leading branding agency and creator of one of my favorite surveys, the  Global Brand Simplicity Index, recently tweeted a request for definitions of simplicity. A few samples:

Magnus Kähler ‏‪@kahler Simplicity is not about being simplistic. It’s about a smart & clear entry point into a rich, multifaceted idea/concept.
claudiu florea ‏‪@claudinho Simplicity is: thoughtful reduction, focus on the meaningful
Dan Bryant ‏‪@DanBryantPR  Simplicity is the absence of hyperbole and conjecture – a rare thing in the comms world!

Good thoughts – but not quite the essence of it.  My definition?

“Simplicity is self-evidence, with all but the truth stripped away.”
Why is that important?  Work it backwards.  Brands are built on and sustained by trust.  Trust emanates from truth.  The truth of brand promises is that which is self-evident in consumers’ experiences with a brand.   The nature of a brand’s true benefits can best be observed in those experiential moments – can most clearly be self-evident – if all extraneous “brand dressing” is stripped away. In short: simplicity.

Identify and Communicate the Simple Truth About Your Brand
At Creative on Call, we see our mission as helping clients identify and communicate the simple truth about their brands.   What can you strip away from your brand positioning, brand communications, brand experiences that isn’t absolutely essential to the core truth you offer?

Suggested reading:
3 Ways Simplicity Pays (highlights from the Global Brand Simplicity Index)
Tell the Truth:  Why Honesty is your Most Powerful Marketing Tool

BRANDS NEED TO OFFER CONTENT BEYOND CLAIMS FOR BRAND POSITIONING TO RING TRUE

The ad column in The New York Times last Friday was headlined “Paring Down Marketing Messages to a Few Simple Basics,” and offered this overview:

“SIMPLY put, a lot of what Madison Avenue says these days is simply put.  “Simply,” “simple” and “simplicity” — along with like-minded thoughts that include “easy,” “honest” and “clear” — have become marketing buzzwords in response to three related trends: how busy life today seems, the growing complexity of technology and the increasingly complicated economic picture. That has encouraged advertisers to woo consumers with promises to provide solutions that are meant as simple but not simplistic.”

What follows are several examples, essentially of fairly traditional lip service to simplicity, from brands that offer little in the way of simplifying substance or news. Ivory Soap (“Keep it pure, clean and simple.”).  California Milk Processor Board (“Real. Simple. Got Milk?”).  And the Simply Juices line from Coca-Cola, where the name supposedly says it all (but in an altogether undifferentiated way from any other 100% juice line).

My favorite misplaced example offered is Real Simple magazine, the forest-killing monthly that, fattened with ad pages, seems to be telling us that all we need to reach simple nirvana is more stuff (preferably from its own licensed lines of products available at major retailers).

SIMPLICITY DOES PAY OFF IN BRANDING
I am actually quite interested in the subject of simplicity, in marketing and otherwise, having long subscribed to the philosophy of “simple is good,” so I searched the article eagerly for new facts, studies, evidence of how and why simplicity is making real in roads.  But where was the mention of Seigel+Gale’s  intriguing “Simplicity Index,” which for several years has brought some statistical rigor to the subject and philosophy upon which that firm bases its entire business? And where were the mentions of marketers reaching out to actively help consumers simplify their lives via instructive content marketing?

And I wish that Stuart Elliot had at least touched on the inherent problem of a core lack of truth or significance in so many of these traditional assertion-not-substance campaigns?  He might have at least mentioned that “simplicity” is one of those unregulated claims – like “all natural” (which was featured on the opposite page in an article about a new class action suit against General Mills for false advertising) – which, while appealing to consumers also runs the risk of incurring their wrath if found to be untrue or not compelling in its minimal truthfulness. (Interestingly, I think what Simply Juices wants to do with their name is side-step the whole “natural” brouhaha, and I would argue with Mr. Elliot that their campaign isn’t part of the simplicity versus complexity but positions them as natural without saying so. Unfortunately, this side-stepping hasn’t saved the brand from its own class-action lawsuit headaches.)

As Seigel+Gale’s index shows, simplicity, if actually delivered, can be a major brand-building benefit (and a boost to shareholder value; take a look at the numbers in the “Simplicity Portfolio” contained within the annual index report).  Likewise, the mandate for truthfulness in a media age controlled by consumers, online and off, can be turned to significant marketing advantage, as illustrated in Jonathan Baskin’s new book “Tell the Truth:  Honesty is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool.” But as those and other observers note, that advantage arises out of demonstrating simplicity and delivering on it as a brand experience – not simply claiming it as a positioning, or incorporating it into a theme line or brand name.

While I wish that Mr. Elliot had dug a little deeper into the subject, I more so fault the marketers and, most of all, their very traditional agencies, which are stuck in their apparently still-profitable rut of speaking at consumers rather than with them, of asserting rather than demonstrating, of interrupting their lives with paid messages rather than enhancing their lives with the information, education and entertainment they need and want.  In short, traditional agencies are still making image-based claims without bringing them alive with content (or even self-evident truth) – and in this age, that simply won’t do.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, if only as a way to redeem all the chopped up bits of time I seem to have in my car. For business learning I tend to favor the unpolished enthusiasm of ‘casts such as the relatively new Mastering Social Business by Kelly Noble and Paul Serwin.  But I also listen to more established voices, including that of Mitch Joel and his Six Pixels of Separation. He and his guests typically have lot to offer, once you get past the self-congratulatory plugging of upcoming books or the hubristic backslapping of bright guys buying their own press.

Is Your Brand All About the Truth?
Speaking of books and hubris, a recent Six Pixels guest, Jonathan Baskin (prolific author, columnist, marketing consultant) caught my ear with this whopper of a comment:

“I hate the word content…  We brand marketing folks don’t create content… we share truth.”

Wow.  Brand marketers share truth (and content marketers, presumably, share something less). Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m with Baskin in the apparent premise of his new book (which I have yet to read), Tell the Truth: Honesty is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool.  In fact, the elevator speech for Creative on Call has, for sometime, been that we are a “…creative services company that helps marketers identify and communicate the simple truth about brands…”  And I still quaintly but firmly believe that building marketing programs on a foundation of rational and emotional truth is the best (perhaps only) way to build brand trust.

“My Brand is the Way and The Truth and The Lifestyle. No one comes to the Market Except by Me.”  What’s missing for me in all this is a sense of perspective, even humility – and I don’t mean from Baskin, I mean from the advertising and marketing industry as a whole. Marketers wanting to traffic in the truth will do well to remember a few key points:

1.  Brand evangelism is just an expression.   In selling sodas and hawking hotels, we may be pushing a lifestyle, but we’re not promoting a path to cosmic consciousness or even worldly wholeness.  We’re selling stuff.
2.  We are sales people, not preachers.  And like good sales people, we may be great listeners, entertainers, educators… but we cannot believably pretend to be  apostles of the Truth, with a capital T.  People don’t buy it (Neilsen reports that less than half of all people trust paid advertising, the lifeblood of brand marketers, and that confidence level is steadily declining year after year).
3.  There’s nothing wrong with selling stuff.  There’s a tendency toward denial, especially among my creative kin, about the fact that all of our efforts, our time, our creativity is being channeled into selling.  But why?  It’s not a four letter word (OK, creative people might use it more freely if it was).  By being honest about what we’re doing, we can engage more comfortably, and believably, with consumers, and encourage them to engage with us.  Earning media might, of course, call for content marketing, to add a little pull to the paid media push (the same Neilsen report notes very high levels of trust in earned media).

It would also require creative folks like me to embrace the fact that we’re creating ads, not art. After all, what’s wrong with that?  We’re former English and Art majors lucky enough to have stumbled into a lucrative profession.  Enjoy it for what it is, drop the pretense, and get on with business! (This is not to say, however, that one need not be artful in the approach to creating ads… it’s still human-to-human communication, at least if you want it to work).

I hope Mr. Baskin is successful in convincing hoards of brand marketers to take up the banner of truth in advertising; if it becomes more than self-congratulatory corporate speak, marketers and their consumers should both profit.

HOW TO WRITE AN EFFECTIVE CREATIVE STRATEGY – PLUS A SAMPLE CREATIVE BRIEF

This is a blog about issues of brand trust, written by the head of a creative project agency – and yet it’s never addressed one critical, trust-building (or trust-destroying) tool:  The creative brief.  Allow me to correct that oversight now.

Building brand trust starts with building team trust
You may be a marketing mega-maven who’s just crafted the most compelling marketing strategy ever seen for creating a customer-centric,  consumer-delighting, trust- and loyalty-building brand experience – but if your creative team doesn’t have an actionable brief, they’re never going to be able to create the communications and content that bring it all to life.

Even worse, they’re going to get frustrated, ticked off or both, inevitably retreating into the traditional we/they posture that so often besets creative and clients (or account people).  In short, if your creative team doesn’t trust you to give them the support and consideration they need, they won’t be able to give you the trust-building campaign your brand deserves.  Oh, they may give you something cool, cutting-edge, and totally irrelevant – but if you want honest human communication, everybody is best served by investing the time to create an effective, usable creative brief.

How to write a creative strategy that makes the creative work… work
In my experience, whether at BBDO New York working on superbrands like Pepsi or GE or in my own agency, working for big brands and start-ups alike, there are five relatively simple, but routinely overlooked, keys to creating a strategic process that creates team trust:

1. Include the creative team in the strategic process.
   I know that everybody likes to own their own corporate turf, but if brand managers, or the account people who serve them at agencies, aren’t willing to vest the creative team in the formation of the creative
   strategy, well, you can pretty much count on less-than-strategic creative results.
2. Keep the creative brief brief
   Your creative team has to distill a ton of information into a campaign of integrated, and largely short form, communications:  TV spots of 30 seconds or less; blog posts of 300-400 words; tweets of 140 characters max; images with no words of explanation at all.  You, as the owner of the strategic process, will do everyone a huge favor if you distill what you can upfront.
3. Skip the marketing jargon…
   … that is, unless you want the creative team to go mad and drive a stake(holder) through the heart they’re convinced you don’t have.
4. Keep it consumer-benefit focused
   Save the product-centric copy for the catalog; whether you’re developing a website, ad campaign, sales collateral or all the above, all communications need to focus on what’s in it for the consumer.
5. Use the creative strategy as your guide to judging the creative work
   Unlike some of my creative kin who feel that their creative output should be embraced without question as divine revelation, I believe that the creative marketing process requires dialogue. Unfortunately, clients and creatives frequently seem to speak different languages.  You can facilitate productive discussion and collaboration by leveraging a well-wrought creative strategy as your Rosetta Stone for interpreting, and constructively criticizing, work.DOWNLOAD A SAMPLE CREATIVE BRIEF 

And what does it look like when one doesn’t use the creative strategy process as the opportunity to develop a constructive, mutually trusting client-creative relationship?  Sometimes, something like this:

Conversations go better over a cup of coffee… so let’s make this another Free Coffee Card post.  The first 10 to comment will get a Starbuck’s Coffee card.  Enjoy!
_____________________________________________________________ 

I like to blog about marketing to millennials not simply because it’s the subject matter that consistently draws the most readers but because, as those readers know, millennials are no longer what’s next, they’re what’s now.

And while I have previously observed that for this generation brand interaction and attachment is less a matter of trust than transaction, I don’t mean to leave you with the impression that that’s entirely a bad thing (not that I can’t be a self-righteous, judgemental S.O.B when I want to be).  It can, after all, lead to a much more dynamic, even kinetic (if unpredictable) brand-consumer relationship. As Nick Shore of MTV notes in a recent post on the Harvard Business Review blog,  it’s a relationship shaped by the fascination with, and extensive exposure to, video games.  He makes a compelling case that marketers wanting to get to the next level with millennials have to observe a new set of rules to win in the “gamification of marketing.”

Here are brief highlights of what he had to say; I suggest that anyone interested in marketing to millennials read the entire post.

Principle #1: Play fair or you are “fair game”
Millennials demand fairness, transparency, and clear, consistent rules in every aspect of life.

 Principle #2:  Leverage the Leaderboard
Four out of five want to know how the deals they get compare to what others are getting. 74% percent feel that they’ve “won” when they get more than the average consumer.

 Principle #3:  Smart Cuts, Not Short Cuts
Part of the “intrinsic” reward of gaming (the pleasure of playing versus the end reward) is a sense of efficacy and smartness. There’s a clear case for layering this into the marketing interaction.

 Principle #4: Deliver dopamine/adrenaline fixes
Half of respondents in our study — perhaps those more prone to Millennial micro-boredom — believe that “life can be less stimulating than gaming.”

 Principle #5: Hand over that joystick.
Millennials are accustomed to having a voice, and having it heeded. And they’re frustrated when big corporations don’t give them a voice or a true “role” as a consumer…

Game on!

Image still counts – actually, it counts more than ever in the hyper-competitive world of brand marketing. And in the word-driven (search and social media) world we live and work in, words are often our primary, or at least initial, image creators. As I always tell clients, creating a brand image is about helping prospects imagine what it’ll be like to buy, use or in any way be part of your brand. (Or, to borrow more theological terminology, words incarnate, putting flesh and bones on your brand promises, so make sure you use words that can breath life into ideas.)

Unoriginal should be unacceptable
So why do so many leading brands rely on the stalest of clichés in their communications? Case in point, a recent post from a major business consulting firm entitled “Marketing ROI on Steroids.” I read the title before seeing the attribution and immediately assumed that the source must be a small-time player that can’t afford, or doesn’t care, to invest in fresh communications. But it’s from an A-list name that not only can afford to do better, but which, at least in the long term, can’t afford not to.

Tired language implies brand fatigue
It’s hard to imagine a more exhausted, less-pumped-up cliché than “________ on steroids.” and yet there it was, paired with a less-than-imaginative image of what used to be called dumbbells (I’ll let you make of that what you will). Taken all together, it could only detract from my expectations as I began to read… in fact causing me at first to dismissively skim the article (before catching myself in my own pledge to not post about things I haven’t thoroughly read).

Still, I don’t mean to be hard on just one firm – many other good business thinkers fall into the same trap of assuming that original thinking will stand out on its own merits, even when communicated in unoriginal language.

3 key to keep clichés from killing your brand
Just to be sure I’m not simply harping, but also helping, I’d like to offer three simple steps that can conquer the scourge of hackneyed hyperbole and confidence-killing clichés.

1. Get help.
If you just want to put words into your messages, get a dictionary (there are dictionaries of clichés, you know). If you want to put meaning and a unique brand voice into your marketing and other communications, get professional, outside help (the outside part is important, because even if you’re a communications firm, you need perspective, and that takes input from the outside). Yes, this is a self-serving suggestion – but also an important one.

2. Get tough.
I came of creative age under the tutelage of the late legend Phil Dusenberry, at BBDO New York, a great writer and idea man whom his staff often referred to as “Redo-senberry,” and his shop as BBDO: Bring it Back and Do it Over. The point is, learning not to settle for the first OK, workable idea was a matter of survival… and it still is, in this very unforgiving, seen-it-all-before marketplace. So demand more of yourself and of those writing, designing and creating for you. Give great direction, and expect great work in return.

3. Get a voice.
If you take the time to develop a unique brand voice – which of course comes after developing a unique brand positioning and personality – clichés just won’t sound right to you. To develop that voice, make sure you adhere to points 1 and 2 above.

What are some of your least favorite marketing clichés?

As with any advancing army, it should be no surprise that people just can’t get their minds off Millennials (and no wonder that any variation of “millennial” makes a most attractive keyword in blog posts). But how well do you understand them, even if you are “them?” And how much are you like, or unlike, the Millennial generation?

Are you 20% Millennial? 50% Millennial? 100%?
The folks at Pew Research developed a handy little quiz to answer that last question: “How Millennial Are You? The Quiz.” It turns out that, while I am nearly a Gen Xer, at least according to this evaluation, I’m only 31% Millennial. (Damn, I guess I’ll have to take my hoodies back to Abercrombie.)

I’m not sure how valuable this “tool” really is in understanding the millennial marketing juggernaut, but it’s fun and at least mildly thought provoking (not to mention an excellent excuse to pack a post with high-value keywords like “millennials,” “millennial marketing,” and “millennial generation”).

It’s not about age – really. It’s about state of mind.
The quiz is quite quick – so please take it and let me know how youthful you really are.

PS: Pew did create a pretty good primer on Millennial beliefs, attitudes and behaviors, which you can download here.