Recently, American Express won the 2010 Forrester Research Voice of the Customer Award. Companies who win this award are recognized for the way they collect, interpret, and react to customer feedback. Simply, these companies listen. They take it seriously. They make internal changes to create an even better experience and a stronger relationship.

American Express describes this process as “Relationship Care”.

The “Relationship Care” servicing ethos centers on the idea that every customer interaction is not just a transaction but an opportunity to deepen the relationship and drive customer loyalty.

Forrester

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You have invested a substantial amount of money in not only creative development but also media. Three months after starting the campaign, your sales aren’t up. It immediately appears like the creative didn’t work, so you’re on the phone scrambling to either change creative or your media mix.
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A few months back I was leading a brand workshop for one of our clients as part of a corporate rebranding program. This particular workshop involved associates directly at the front of the client relationship: folks who either directly faced the client or provided work product for those who did. After moving through about half of our planned exercises, one of the participants remarked, “Management can do whatever they want, this won’t change my job.”

After removing my jaw from the floor, I realized how much work we had to do in building a compelling brand experience for this particular client. And, yet it reminded me that one of the larger misconceptions of branding is that it starts and stops with the marketing department. At Mlicki, we can’t think of any bigger misunderstanding than that.

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Anyone who has ever step foot in our conference room has seen the rules we live by broken down into small digestible snippets of information. One of our personal favorites is “Saying very little, often speaks volumes.” Or in other words, simpler is sometimes better.

Part of what we do when starting a project is breaking it down to it’s most simplest form and begin there. Whether it’s the brand thinking behind a logo or the theme that underlies a corporate brochure, the ability to communicate a complicated message in a simple manner is a hallmark of a great designer. or illustrator. or actor. or quarterback. or pilot. or anyone, really.
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We hear this all the time, “I just want to make sure everything looks the same.” Sounds like a pretty good idea. But, offering consistently poor communications isn’t any better than delivering a steady stream of inconsistent ones. Ultimately, a lot of branding efforts and rebranding programs fail for precisely this reason — organizations spend all their time focusing on whether the corporate identity is being used properly rather than ensuring that their brands are providing a consistent experience to the customer. That’s not to say that brand consistency isn’t important. Rather the contrary. Ultimately, the world’s leading brands are focused on delivering a consistent feeling to the customer through their brand communications and brand experience. A good example is Urban Outfitters. (more…)