Branding is an integral part of modern business strategy. But while there are dozens of books on branding products and marketing campaigns, nobody has applied the logic and techniques of branding to customer service — until now.

Branded Customer Service is a practical guide to moving service delivery to a new level so that brand reinforcement occurs every time customers interact with organizational representatives. Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart show how to infuse an entire organization with brand values and create a recognizable style of service that reflects brand promises and brand images.

Delivering quality customer service with a constant, consistent brand message is a powerful way to extend a brand’s reach, say authors and consultants Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart. When consumers have a positive experience, they buy more and become repeat customers. No doubt, it certainly would be great for morale if employees embodied their brands and if employers honored all their advertising claims and kept all their promises to staffers and consumers. The problem is that companies do many things that have nothing to do with branding. At least, that is true everywhere except inside this book, which suffers from brand myopia or, maybe, just tunnel vision. The book has many strong assets: it offers chapters of solid instruction, it makes a great case that good companies should deliver good service and it contains a helpful “toolbox” of branding-related exercises for managers. It just seems to posit that every non-manufacturing aspect of IBM, Apple or Coca-Cola is about branding – but it is not. Still, for the intrepid manager who wants to provoke more customer interaction and employee involvement around the brand totem, The book is instructive, particularly the interesting anecdotes and case studies. Of course, branding activities can be very effective – but, like other campaigns, they are best when executed with perspective.

• Integrated branding works best when all aspects of the brand are communicated through the corporate culture.
• Translating brand elements into customer service is the most powerful branding tool.
• A study of 90 global corporations found that 45% of the managers did not understand their own brand’s positioning.
• The same study found that 62% of senior managers did not support the brand.
• The origin of the word “brand” is Middle English and it means flame or torch.
• The father of advertising, Earnest Elmo Calkins (1868-1964), first conceived of associating products with people’s ideals and aspirations.
• About 18% of consumers’ decisions to buy are based on brand awareness.
• After consumers buy a branded product, they become more aware of its advertising. That, in turn, drives more repeat sales.
• Studies show customers will pay 19% more for a brand name than for a weaker label.
• Yet, the feelings people have about a brand are mostly subconscious.

Matching Words and Actions

While all brands are intended to generate specific customer reactions, “branded customer service” drives home even more powerful impressions. Done properly, it can increase a brand’s positive impressions, creating a ripple effect and adding to the brand’s overall strength.

“Branding can best be understood as a business strategy in great part to gain customer trust.”

Brands are a combination of values, beliefs and service expectations. A brand can propel a product and keep it fresh in customers’ minds, the harbor for the complex group of associations a brand name embodies. Branding is not just a concept bandied about by the marketing department. When a consumer has to choose between competing brands of anything from tissue paper to automobiles, the three elements of branding – authority, identification and social approval – play a role in the buying decision. These elements may help explain why Julia Roberts has been Hollywood’s highest paid actress for the past 20 years. She is a known quality; when people go to see her movies, they know they will feel good when they leave the theater.

“The key element in the chain, the actual service experience, is often overlooked because either advertising agencies and traditional marketers typically do not have core competencies in this area or they do not have the mandate to shape and influence it.”

Advertising addresses consumer wants and needs that can be satisfied consciously and unconsciously. Branding works at different levels to meet those needs, and becomes more powerful when it evokes positive memories, even if the consumer doesn’t make a conscious connection. Look at Morton Salt, a commodity product and category leader that still uses its old logo (a little girl under an umbrella). The brand has powerful associations for generations of mothers and daughters who cook together. When harried shoppers are making quick choices about buying this basic commodity, they often select the container they know well, the one with a positive connotation, even if it costs a few pennies more. Consumers are willing to pay that price for peace of mind and the feeling that they made the right decision.

Is the Brand Right for You? Are You Right for the Brand?

One useful exercise for understanding branding and the real relationship between consumers and a brand is to think of the brand from the product’s perspective. According to this approach, the brand has its own attitude. Would a high-end Gucci bag be happiest being carried by you?

“Today, brands are presented as groups of ideas, rather than merely logos.”

In this way, branding can discourage business by implying that a product doesn’t fit certain consumers. Be sure you are not inadvertently discouraging customers you would like to have. Suppose a small business wants to hire a large accounting firm. But the accounting firm only advertises that it caters to huge corporations. That message effectively eliminates the small business from even approaching the accountants. The accounting firm actually is also searching for new small business clients, but the client has no way of knowing that. In this case, the brand (the accounting firm) spoke and the marketplace (the small firms) received the message. As a result, no business was transacted.

“As actor and film producer Robert Redford says, ’If it’s not personal, then there won’t be any passion or commitment’.”

Today, brand consciousness is high, but so is brand warfare. High quality brand products compete intensely for profitability. Basically, customers will pay more for a brand they like. That translates into higher stock prices, which also boost the price of “intangible assets,” such as patent rights, intellectual property, trademarks and copyrights. This so-called brand equity accounted for up to 90% of Coca-Cola’s book value in the late-1990s, according to John Murphy, a branding expert in the United Kingdom. Companies with stronger brands also have more credibility with employees and, as a result, lower turnover, which also increases profitability. A well-recognized brand even helps pre-sell new clients, which increases the effectiveness of marketing and sales.

More than Service with a Smile: Service with a Brand

Strong brands can motivate customers to take specific actions. Fulfilling or beating customers’ expectations creates a powerful, long-lasting impression, as verified by studies of customers and advertising claims. Some 780 consumer interviews conducted from January through March, 2002, showed that ads that tell customers what to expect combined with actual service that meets or surpasses the ads’ claims creates the most positive brand links.

“It is possible to create a commodity product, and then create such a unique brand position that the average consumer visits a location 18 times a month – as Starbucks has done.”

The lesson from these studies was straightforward: the most powerful bond between brand and reputation is service, more specifically, “branded service.” In addition, pairing service and brand generates a competitive advantage. You can give customers personalized quality service that they can’t find replicated elsewhere. Competitively, this combination of quality and personalization is unbeatable.

“When well received and developed, a brand is a vibrant picture held in consumers’ minds.”

Each customer contact employee who practices brand message awareness magnifies your brand’s positive impact. A study by the American Society for Training and Development found that companies that trained their staff members to deliver branded customer service had several advantages over companies that did not provide employees with brand awareness training. These advantages included:

• 20% higher book values.

• 57% more sales per employee. • 37% higher gross profits.

Companies such as Nordstrom, Inc., The Walt Disney Company, Southwest Airlines Co., Pret a Manger (Europe), Limited Brands, Inc., and Vodafone Group PLC have adopted branded customer service and reaped some of these benefits. In contrast, generic service that is helpful, polite and ultimately undistinguishable will not produce memorable experiences for customers. To make branded service a company-wide effort, managers should:

• Get management and all employees to buy into delivering on those brand promises.

• Deliver on the brand’s promises consistently to all customers.

• Teach employees how the company’s marketing and mission statement defines your brand and what they must do to deliver on those promises. • Let employees deliver these promises in their own individual, characteristic ways with flair and personality. Do not force them to memorize canned scripts. • Once all employees understand the basics of the brand they should use the terms “on-brand” and “off-brand” to identify when other employees are acting in accordance with the brand’s promise (“on-brand”) and when they are not (“off-brand”).

An organization that delivers branded service should resonate with customers because it is different and because it emphasizes a key brand characteristic (i.e., freshness, knowledge or cleanliness), which it delivers naturally and consistently.

The first step toward delivering branded customer service is to distill your brand’s essence. In preparation, your company’s branding team should answer these questions:

• What is the brand’s mission and purpose?

• How are these brand values delivered to customers?

• What is our identity?

• What promise does the brand make to customers? • How is the brand seen in the actual market? • What stories of our successes and failures exist in the marketplace?

“Brand management is essentially about culture change.”

The answers will provide the basis for branded service and can produce some remarkable changes. Take Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS). In the early 1980s, SAS set out to become a business airline that delivered on-time travel. To get its new message across, the CEO ordered all employees – from pilots to reservation clerks and luggage handlers – to take part in a two-day program devoted to making this cultural change. In 1981, the idea of a major corporation holding meetings involving all employees and all departments was very rare. One year after the meetings, SAS was named the world’s top airline, and went from suffering losses to profitability. British Airways undertook similar training efforts with its 38,500 employees in the early 1980s, as part of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s plan to increase the airline’s value before it was privatized. The following year, the world’s top airline was British Airways.

Focus on Employees

Your employees carry your brand’s message. They are the providers of your product or service. If you do not communicate to them about where the company is going and how they are making an important contribution, their motivation will suffer.

“Indeed in the current age of integrated branding, organizational culture is often referred to as the internal brand.”

One way to improve internal communication is to disclose the company’s financial information and future goals. Studies have shown there is a knowledge gap between what employees know about their employer and how much trust they feel. A U.S. Council of Communication Management study (1998) found that 64% of employees do not believe their senior managers. Another study found that 50% of employees do not know what their company is trying to accomplish. Information generates trust.

“When an organization is branded from the inside out, managers will have a context by which to filter their supervisory behaviors towards their staff.”

To correct these knowledge gaps, managers should treat employees like customers and undertake internal brand marketing as part of their employee communications program. The goal of this effort is to change behavior so employees will act in accord with the brand’s meaning. To accomplish this, relate your communication effort to employee issues about the brand and what it represents. Make your message emotional as well as practical. Staffers like to hear stories about their company that illustrate how it solved a problem or helped people. The solutions to the problems in your stories should illustrate some of the brand’s benefits.

“If a brand has a strength and excitement, it gives staff a sense of identity, a feeling of belonging, and makes them feel positive about going to work.”

Conduct your internal brand marketing program face-to-face. Don’t fall back on the easy way and run it all through your website. Instead, hold small and large meetings. Engage employees. Ask for feedback and ideas. Involve opinion leaders among your employees. Often, they are natural leaders who have great credibility with their co-workers. This effort may also produce a “brand champion,” someone passionately involved with the brand and its ideals. Finally, do not inundate employees with paper work, e-mails and numerous presentations. Fewer, but more effective, presentations work best.

“Today, many people, such as musicians, actors, entertainers, and even some businesspeople, view themselves as brands when just a few years ago they would have felt cheapened to think of themselves this way.”

These internal branding efforts will also revitalize your human resources department. To add a new dimension to the company, select employees according to a spectrum of abilities, including how well they can embody a brand. However, some companies carry this approach to an extreme. Abercrombie & Fitch, Co., an apparel company, hired salespeople who looked like its catalogue models. This practice raised issues about hiring discrimination, since the hiring qualifications were so narrow. To be successful, hiring must seek people with the skills and personality characteristics to deliver the brand benefits to customers.

“J. Robinson, a noted economist of the 1930s, emphasized the inherent value of widely recognized trademarks: ’Various brands of a certain article which in fact are almost exactly alike may be sold at different qualities under names and labels which will induce rich and snobbish buyers to divide themselves from the poor buyers’.”

To drive home the entire branded customer service message, your branding team should visit a company that they admire for its brand prowess and analyze its branding practices. This could include a field trip to a firm such as the Great Harvest Bread Company, where the mission statement is: “Be loose and have fun. Bake phenomenal bread. Run fast to help customers. Create strong and exiting bakeries. And give generously to others.”

After a visit to a company that uses excellent branding practices, your team should discuss whether the site was on- or off-brand and how it met their expectations about what the brand should deliver. Analyze which specific personnel behaviors made the experience memorable and what detracted from the experience. This experience should help generate an understanding of the customer’s perspective that your team can apply to your brand.

Janelle Barlow is president of TMI and a partner in TMI International, a consulting firm with offices in 36 countries. She is also the author of A Complaint Is A Gift and Emotional Value. She regularly appears on CNBC’s NPR Marketplace. Paul Stewart is director of TMI New Zealand and the former chief economist for the ANZ Banking Group.