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:

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.

The Altimeter Group is embarking on an ambitious attempt to understand and define the evolution of the customer experience, what they have coined “The Dynamic Customer Journey.” As they summarize it:

“The customer journey has evolved, yet organizations have failed to recognize and adapt to the change. Today, the new customer is empowered to make faster, smarter, more-informed decisions using technology, for instance, by accessing real-time information on their mobile devices or connecting with trusted peers across open and closed social networks. To respond to a dynamic customer journey, organizations must transform their rigid sales, marketing, and customer service programs and adopt an intrinsically more flexible organizational, technological, and go-to-market approach”

The Dynamic Human Journey
Their observations focus on organization, technology and process – but I hope they will also include, and invite others to comment on, core issues of human communication that arise from the often-bewildering challenges listed above. In fact, I submit that customers may not always be so “empowered” as “challenged” to “make faster, smarter, more informed decisions.”

Are Your Customers Developing a Complexity Complex?
Altimeter may be nodding in this direction when they note in a heading “The Factors that Impact the Dynamic Customer Journey Multiply Complexity.” Of course, we face more than just the question of how to control, minimize and seamlessly integrate structural complexities – we face the challenge of how to ensure that the composite end result amounts to useful, usable, human relations and communications.

Not surprisingly, “useful” and “useable” correlate well with “simple.” Siegel+Gale has been tracking the need for, and benefits of, simplicity for some time, and their latest Simplicity Index points out the paradoxical blessing/curse of technology:

“On the one hand, the steady stream of innovation continues to make it easier for consumers to watch, listen, share and communicate. But many companies in acquisition mode have expanded their profiles and portfolios and incorporated such a sea of product models and technology types that many customers feel lost as they attempt to navigate their way to a simple purchase.”

Simply Put, Brands Need to Put it Simply
The upshot seems to be that brands must embrace a unifying and simplifying approach to technology and communications. Easier said than done? Perhaps. Nonetheless, I suggest, and invite comment on, two guiding principles:

1. Brands that take the complexity burden off of consumers will step to the fore.
2. Of those complexity-defying brands, the ones that learn to also communicate in
   the simplest, most communally human terms will be the long-term winners

Human-to-Human Communication vs. Brand to Prospect
Do you agree? Disagree? And do you believe that considering the dynamics of honest human communication – alongside organizational, technological and process-oriented factors – would enhance the Altimeter discussion?

Please leave a comment, and join in the Altimeter discourse.

Is your employee branding as good for employees as it is for the brand?

It’s a hot topic that goes by many monikers: employment branding, internal branding, corporate citizenship strategy, employee engagement. From a marketing perspective (and I won’t even get into the HR benefits here), it’s the logical – and necessary – extension of external branding, the organizational means by which positive brand experiences are created and core brand promises are kept. It recognizes that inculcating employees with brand values, and nurturing them as true brand believers, is the center of any sincere effort to be customer-centric. But can employee branding create too much employee belief, too much trust? A article in the Iowa Law Review answers a resounding, and potentially troubling, “Yes.”

HAS IN-HOUSE COUNSEL CLEARED YOUR INTERNAL BRANDING?
The article is “Managing Identity: Buying in to the Brand at Work,” by Marion Crain, a Wiley B. Rutledge Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work & Social Capital, Washington University School of Law (and I thought corporate titles could be a little over done).

For a lawyer, she gives a pretty good overview of the power of employment branding, complete with case histories and at considerable length. Her main point is that internal branding (unlike its external counterpart) is not subject to regulation, even though it can have serious consequences for employees, particularly when it encourages them to over-invest in company stock:

“The more effective the branding program and the more powerful the appeal of the brand, the more completely workers will embrace it and make investments in the firm that transcend the wage bargain. Internal marketing thus plays a significant role in promoting workers’ psychological bond with the firm. Furthermore, many workers invest more than their hearts and bodies in the firm—they invest their savings. A surprisingly high percentage of employees hold disproportionate amounts of company stock in undiversified 401(k) retirement accounts…”

Crain goes on to suggest that regulation is in order – not exactly what most business leaders want to hear.

A SIMPLE FIX FOR EMPLOYMENT BRANDING – THE SIMPLE TRUTH.
I mention this not to be alarmist, but because I believe there is a simple fix to this, whether or not regulation ever comes, and one that would help accomplish both the HR goals of attract/motivate/retain and the marketing goal of bringing brand promises alive. It’s called the truth. Just as we encourage our clients to identify and communicate the simple truth about their brands for consumer consumption, we would counsel the same for positioning and communicating brands to employees. In fact, we see consumer and employment branding as necessarily being of a piece, requiring:

•   An accurate observation and clear definition of the brand essence – one that rings true with all audiences
•   A use of factually and emotional honest communications
•  A consistency of voice across all audiences, starting with a Theme line that speaks equally well to all constituencies (sorry, just can’t bring my self to say “stakeholders”) as it encapsulates the core brand promise

The classic “G.E. We bring good things to life.” (which I had the privilege of working on) is one good example that pops to mind, at once promising good things to consumers and a sense of doing good for its employees. Likewise, the theme I created for Zurich Life, “The way life should be.” easily bridged brand constituencies (interestingly, music was a key element employed in communicating the brand voice, personality and message to all audiences for both clients… so consider yourself fairly warned that, should you hire Creative on Call, you may be subjected to hearing me sing during presentations).

Can you think of any other examples of campaigns – perhaps that you have worked on – which are or have been equally well, and consistently, applied across all audiences, including employees?

World's least funny logo?

And don’t forget absurdity….    A new survey on the impact of comedy, from, surprise, surprise, Comedy Central, finds that  “More than music, more than sports, more than ‘personal style,’ comedy has become essential to how young men view themselves and others…”

Interestingly, the survey pretty thoroughly dissed distaff millennials (hey, “girls” just aren’t funny, right?  For an alternative perspective, says the father of two girls, check out this New York Times feature).  Of course “Comedy Central’s audience ‘skews 65 percent male.’ So does most of its talent…” and therefore the emphasis makes good business sense, if failing to rise to the level of broadly relevant research.

Still, overlooking the majority of millennials allowed Comedy Central’s researchers to concentrate on the sophisticated tendencies of my much-coveted younger brethren, yielding such nuggets as:

•    Young men like toilet humor (they had to do research to figure that out?)

•     Millennials are “comfortable with uncomfortable truths” (Translation, anything goes)

•      Irony is out, absurdity is in

•      Millennial men have a short attention span (again, my observation from the first bullet above), so keep the humor short and fast-paced

Which is not to say millennial men are immune to comedy of substance (no, not those substances).  Two of their favorite shows are “The Daily Show,” and its love child,  “The Colbert Report,”  arguably two of the funniest  pretend/pretend attacks on the realities of political and cultural life as we suffer them today.

Laugh all you want… funny works.   The upshot for marketers?  Funny works.  Always has. Always will – and with this group, more than ever.  I’d also submit that, as the best humor comes from the truth of life well-observed, brand truth – and ensuing trust – can be built as well on laughter as on any other foundation.

(That said, you might want to ponder the laughable truth about all of us marketing types in Stephen Colbert’s recent “sponsortunity” feature on Wheat Thins.)

The new report “2012 Mobile Future in Focus,” is full of interesting data points and trend tracking, and worth a read.  But this new study, from comScore, is also much like the smartphone users and providers it analyses in that it fails to focus on one critical, looming issue for the future of mobile as a communication and marketing tool:  trust.  In fact, the word “trust” doesn’t even appear in this report.

When Mobile is App-t to Steal Data, Brands Stand to Lose    In the last couple of weeks alone, major stories have broken about apps that are designed to blithely pinch the address books of smartphone users, without any notification, let alone request.  Address books!

Granted, the consumers dubbed “digital omnivores” in this study all seem so gaga over what mobile devices do for them that they don’t even stop to think of what they’re doing to them.  But consumers will eventually wake up – and many, many of them won’t be happy.  This risks distrust and its inevitable by-product, disengagement – just the opposite of what mobile promises.

Will Explosive Mobile Growth Blow Up Brand Trust?    What’s your opinion – will mobile’s explosive growth blow up in marketer’s faces by undermining trust, or will consumers choose to ignore the disrespect for their privacy and property and continue to fuel that growth unabated?

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?

Let’s start the week with a good cup of coffee and conversation, shall we? The first 10 to leave a comment on this post will receive a free Starbucks coffee card. It’s our virtual coffee break, so please, join in.
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There seems to be a sudden fad for the term “Brand Genius,” perhaps driven by the multitudinous tributes to Steve Jobs. And yes, in the case of the late Mr. Jobs I can accept the designation of “genius,” if only because a master’s body of work speaks for itself (please note the use of the lower case in “master,” as I do not wish to perpetuate the trend toward near-deification of the late Apple CEO). But when the term is applied to figures (take that anyway you want) like Kim Kardashian you know it’s time to call out the hype police for a linguistic reality check.

ADWEEK’s Brand Genius Awards… Really?
The branding industry itself isn’t helping much in terms of reigning in the hyperbole. Perhaps you noticed ADWEEK’s recent Brand Genius Awards, formerly known as Marketer of the Year. Apparently the latter was just too straightforward or understated and, like all those reality TV contestants willing to do anything to get attention, needed a makeover. But the honorees themselves seemed to hedge their bets on the credibility – or even communications value – of the new title, as evidenced by the PR release headlined “Progressive’s CMO Jeff Charney Awarded Brand Genius/Marketer of the Year Honor from ADWEEK”

You could say that ADWEEK actually dinged itself (or simply lacks any self-awareness) when it ran this post in its AdFreak blog, about a report that tweeks the ad industry for ridiculous titles like guru, champion, insurgents and genies… a post that appeared directly under a promo for the ADWEEK Brand Genius winners.

So what’s the harm in a little hype?
The harm in all this uber-hype, aside from insufferability, is that every validation of overstatement helps to further invalidate our industry credentials as trustworthy communicators and marketers. Words count. Words have power. Words have life – and that life can be beaten out of them by misuse. When we misuse words like “genius, “ and begin to believe our own subsequent press, we take a step further away from the inherent truth that drives trust, in brands or in people.

Hey Einstein, what do you think?
Would you want to be called brand genius (not that you aren’t one, of course), and how, if at all, do you think the term should be used?

It’s about time for another copyklatsch “virtual coffee break,” so the first ten to comment on this post will receive a Starbucks Coffee card, with our compliments.

There’s a lot of noise about the new Facebook format, but one comment cuts through for me. It’s from the face of Facebook himself, Mark Zuckerberg, who’s quoted in The New York Times, describing the new format as “…an important next step to help tell the story of your life.” I think what he really means is, it’s a powerful next step toward Facebook being able to sell the story of your life.

From User-Generated Content to Users As Content
As Facebook reformats its 800 million users toward ever-more compulsory self-disclosure, (“Hey, let me plop my past, present and future into Facebook’s marketing database with this cool new timeline feature!”) two questions come to mind:

1. Will Facebook users really go for this?
The growth is in millennials, and all who follow them, so, given their previous willingness to forsake privacy for digital community, fame or whatever, the answer to whether or not millennials will take to the timeline may well be “of course.” As noted in the Netpop report Trust Is Social Currency, millennials are definitely the group least concerned with matters of privacy online.

Facebook apparently takes the position that the less concerned you are, the better off you’ll be – or, as Andy Samberg of SNL said in imitating Mark Zuckerberg at F8 during a “serious” moment in a not-terribly-funny run of scatalogical, masturbation and other arrested-development jokes, “You get closer to your authentic identity when you share everything?” Huh? Does Facebook really believe that users won’t realize that whatever they share, Facebook turns around and sells?

2. Will Timeline further corrode our sense of communal trust, online and off?
As Facebook, one of the most influential global communities, becomes ever less about serving its members and ever more about turning them into product, will our human, let alone consumer, notion of mutual trust among community members be supplanted by a purely transactional – and not mutually beneficial – model of agreed-upon interaction (i.e., you give me cool tech toys for free and I’ll give you carte blanche to leverage all the details of my life any way you see fit).

Will the Facebook Timeline Burnish or Tarnish Brand Trust?
This shift could be problematic for brands, should any ensuing trust problems that accrue to Facebook also attach themselves to advertisers or content sponsors – and Facebook already has trust issues. As you can see in this chart from the aforementioned Netpop report, 47% of Facebook users are in the “Uneasies” category, versus 42% for social media sites as a whole.

So, when it comes to putting your brand trust on the line, online, especially in the new “storyselling” environment of Facebook, where to you fall on the spectrum? Uneasy? Ambivalent? Unconcerned?

In my last post, Brands as Functional Friends for Millennials, I opined on the potential to create brand trust, and subsequent loyalty, among Millennials by becoming functional friends, i.e., by actively providing useful resources and support. This is differentiated from the notion of “faux friends,” that is, brands that build excitement, if not real attachment, by being a part of the “gimme culture,” wherein your brand is only as good with its audience as its last offer, daily deal, freebie, or other “gimme.” (For more thoughts on that subject, check out Marketing to Millennials: Brand Trust or Transaction?)

So I’m wondering where on that brand friendship spectrum you would place the involved parties featured in last Sunday’s New York Times article On Campus, It’s One Big Commercial.

Can you sell more soap in an Ivory Tower?
The piece talks about the growing, if not new, marketing practice of not merely reaching out to kids on campus but actually becoming part of institutionalized college life. Besides the well-established outreach of “brand ambassadors” and “campus evangelists” (the commercial kind), the article describes how brands are now even creating events on official school calendars:

“Just how far one big company — Target — has permeated [the University of North Carolina] was evident at freshmen welcome week in late August, at what students and administrators alike characterized as a touchstone party for the class of 2015. As part of the official university program, Target sponsored a welcome dinner on a Friday. Then, on Saturday, for the first real social event for freshmen, it hired buses to ferry students to a Target superstore in Durham for late-night shopping, says Winston B. Crisp, the university’s vice chancellor for student affairs.”

As a parent of not-quite-old-enough-for-college kids, I cringed a bit at the thought of the hallowed halls of higher learning becoming the hollow halls of hyper-selling. As a marketer, however, I have to admit that my initial reaction was “Wow, Target does it again!”

Brand Trust Winners and Losers
Nonetheless, I think there are brand winners and losers in this scenario. The UNC brand (and that of the 65 other universities in the Target program) is at risk here, at least with tuition-paying parents who may look askance at paying for the privilege of turning their kids into a captive marketing audience. (And then there’s the question of maintaining trust in an educational brand’s commitment to unfettered academic inquiry and intellectual honesty, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)

And even the Marvelous Marketing Machine from Minneapolis faces the long-term risk of being seen as a faux friend. After all, no matter how fun and involving the events may be, they are, at their core, selling opportunities dressed up as social occasions. To this crucial demographic group of which one noted survey says “… nothing matters more than authenticity…” events that purport to build school spirit and aid student life, while being commercial at heart, may over the longer term undermine a brands image as an authentic “friend.”

Then again, college kids may just not care – Target’s program is now rockin’ the freshman welcome week ritual at 66 universities across the country. But the business of buying consumer love is a fickle one, as the final quote in the Times article implies:

“Back at Target, Nitin Goel, a wiry, gum-chewing 18-year-old in low-slung jeans, is loaded down with free mac and cheese. He’s carrying a friend’s new beanbag chair. Earlier that night, waiting for the Target bus by the campus bookstore, Mr. Goel had pledged allegiance to Wal-Mart, where he had shopped all his life. Now he doesn’t seem quite so sure.”

My money says that as soon as ol’ Noel gets a free ride and a gaggle of gimmes from former-favorite Wal-Mart, he’s out the Target door once again.

Your thoughts?