Starcom Mediavest has recently undertaken research to assess the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing. Word-of-mouth has always been a difficult element of marketing to quantify and assess, but Starcom believe research shows that 76 per cent of people talk about a brand at least once a day.
At the same time, many companies from Virgin to UBS are concentrating increasing resources on managing the brand experience. They are demonstrating an understanding that a strong brand is built on the customers’ actual experiences, and these are of course likely to be the ones that are passed on by word-of-mouth.
Creating an emotional bond with the brand through a compelling and interesting brand experience is difficult enough in a consumer environment, but would seem almost impossible in B2B, where logic and rationality are supposed to play such a big part in the buying process. In addition, the experience channels and possible brand touch- points are themselves so much less frequent in the B2B environment that it would appear a peripheral concern at best to consider and manage the customer experience with your brand. However, I would argue that it is even more imperative in the lower-budget B2B environment to take a holistic approach to managing your brand, than in the consumer world.
Whereas large consumer brands can try to engage and manage the consumer brand experience through expensive ‘experiential’ marketing programmes, the B2B brand can look at managing customer brand touch-points through internal branding programmes.
By focusing on making your own employees, staff, workforce, colleagues or whatever you call them into brand ambassadors, you are in effect maximising the opportunities of managing customer brand experience. It is obvious that your customer-facing employees should properly portray the essence of the brand of your company. For example, if one of your brand attributes is a professional one, then clearly sales people should look professional in turn.
However, it goes much deeper than this. Ensure that your workforce buys in to the brand not only strengthens its integrity, but exponentially increases the positive associations that customers, suppliers and stakeholders at all levels can gain from interaction.
In a recent merger between two business telecoms companies, a new brand called Affiniti was created. One of their brand values consisted largely of a willingness and desire to immerse itself in the business of its customers. Affiniti not only took this message out to the market in conventional ways, but launched an internal programme to employees in order to properly enthuse the Affiniti staff in this way of thinking. Marketing became an internal change agent for the whole company.
This was a successful initiative and the Affiniti brand has grown strong because of it. There are, however, many more examples of the reverse side of the coin. What happens when you relaunch or revitalise your brand through high impact and intensive external marketing campaign, but you forget to tell your staff? The consequences can be disastrous, because your customers and potential customers are quickly able to perceive that you are lying about your brand, and the mistrust that this generates can damage for years.
The classic example of this was the campaign for what was then called The Midland Bank, which liked to call itself ‘the listening bank’. The only problem was that the queues standing in the bank waiting to be served didn’t feel like they were being listened to at all, and no one had told the tellers what it meant to be a listening bank behind the counter. The brand has, of course, disappeared.
It is so important in B2B to ensure that all the workforce, all the staff and anyone at all in the company from the mailroom to the chairman’s office understand what your brand means, and just as importantly what their role is in delivering it. It is no good telling your workforce that their company is X, Y or Z but neglecting to explain how their expected behaviour in the context of their jobs can portray this. People need to understand their role and importance within the whole brand delivery.
Your workforce is the personal embodiment of your brand, and should be seen as ambassadors and missionaries. They have the potential to create impetus for your brand and will be a touchpoint in all of their interactions with the outside world, whether it’s as a sales person, receptionist service engineer or delivery driver. In other words, if you can manage to motivate your own people with the promise your brand offers, then you have gone a long way to convince others.
