RCME Speaker Janelle Barlow, Ph.D.

For the past five years, the idea of branding has captured business communities everywhere. Tom Peters writes about branding individuals. Las Vegas is certainly a branded city. And people are even talking now about entire countries being branded.

Janelle Barlow, Ph.D. takes that concept one step further by combining it with another powerful idea: customer service.

“This is really about taking your customer relationships and linking them with the psychology of brand. It’s about creating brand-engaged customers by delivering the promises you make when selling to them. What a simple idea!” says the co-author of the newly released book, Branded Customer Service: The New Competitive Edge.

Recently, Barlow shared her work with members of the Retail Consortium for Management Education.

“Almost every person who studies marketing cuts their teeth on the fast-food and consumer goods markets,” says Barlow. “They try to take that process and apply it when people are involved. And I just don’t think it works.

“Especially in the retail business, your brand is your customer relationships in action. In my mind, it’s time for us to look at a different way of evaluating our relationships with our customers.”

Today, every company strives to offer “good service.” The result is that customers have a generic experience of satisfaction.

“Here’s what we know about satisfaction: It means nothing happened. Satisfaction is one of the lowest ways for us to evaluate whether or not the customer is engaged with us. Satisfaction just doesn’t cut it,” says Barlow. Rather, the goal should be engagement.

“Did I engage my customer? Did I make them feel connected to who we are? After all, they came to us for some reason. Did they have a branded service experience? You can see it on people’s faces when they have this experience.

“You really have to have that feeling of engagement. It’s the interaction of one human being with another that is enormously powerful,” she says.

In a marketplace filled with consumer choices, brands make it easier for us to make decisions. Southwest Airlines’ motto is simple, and they deliver, says Barlow. “Decide who your market is, and deliver like crazy to that market, in every way that you can.”

Research has proven the enormous power that lies in delivering what is advertised; likewise, it’s a huge cost to a company when it doesn’t come through on its advertising.

Companies set expectations with customers through their branding efforts. Brands are a mark of trust. Yet trust is in short supply in today’s world, says Barlow.

The Society for Consumer Affairs Professionals studied 4,000 consumers, and found that only one in 20 trust the organizations that serve them. And only one in 40 consumers believes that organizations trust them. “There is huge opportunity here, huge!” says Barlow.

Barlow encouraged participants to pay attention to their own reactions as consumers. “They’re really subtle. But they make the difference as to whether or not we walk out and feel we’ve had a good shopping experience. The question is, can you engineer those things into the experience? I think you can, but you have to think it through.”

Barlow also made these points:

•Be very clear about defining your market. It’s a big mistake to try to satisfy everybody.

•You need to tell a story about who you are. Your brand story is an instant emotional way that tells what the brand stands for.

•If you would describe your company today, how would you be different from your competitor? Constantly think differentiation.

•Companies should have employees as excited about their products as their customers are. Staff must be engaged with the brand. It’s got to be inside the culture.

• A huge part of engagement with the customer happens with nonverbal communication. “We really need to spell it out to staff real clearly. Whatever your brand attitude is, that’s what they’ve got to put on,” says Barlow. Staff needs to understand that ‘I’m creating the brand with this person. It’s my interaction with her that matters.’

Remember, says Barlow, it’s about what we do with the customers, not to our merchandise.

More information on RCME programs

Retail Management Institute - Santa Clara University
rmi.scu.edu