Over the last year we’ve had a front-row seat to a textbook example that leapt from the business section to the front page, and is now being splashed across televisions sets around the globe. It’s pretty widely acknowledged that Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe” screwed up royally – after all, their greedy myopia nearly brought the global economy to its knees.

At the first public hearings on the crisis just a few short weeks ago, a Reuter’s article noted that “Wall Street’s chiefs acknowledged taking on ‘too much risk’ and having ‘choked’ on their own cooking, but stopped short of an apology….”

Do we wonder why financial services firms are held in such low esteem? While it may be a particularly low point for the industry, this isn’t a new thing. Nearly six years ago, a Forrester 2004 report What Satisfies Financial Services Consumers noted that, “Less than half of US consumers believe that their firm would do what’s right for the consumer without government regulation.”

Funny, because the taglines and ads of these same financial services firms – and many like them – drip with sincerity and concern; for our financial wellbeing and security, as well as more emotional pleas like “peace of mind.” On the one hand, they want us to “trust them.” On the other, they have done – and seemingly continue to do – everything in their power to prove that we can’t possibly.

The funny thing is, most of these banking and financial services executives seem to be thinking all this negative sentiment will just go away. And maybe it will. But hoping your screw-ups will get swept under the rug when you neglect to acknowledge them isn’t the way to build an enduring brand.

It’s a classic brand gap. And you don’t need a brand audit or customer experience research to figure it out. No matter the size of the company or the industry you’re in, if there’s a disconnect between what you say and how you behave, your customers are going to know it. Of course, most disconnects aren’t so blatant, nor so well publicized.

How is your organization doing with its brand promises and gaps? just because you don’t see your mistakes on CSPAN doesn’t mean that all’s well, or that disgruntled customers will sit idly by. To butcher the late John Irving, sorrow floats – and loyalty sinks. Glub glub glub.

Yet in addition to the “common knowledge” of the ‘net as a multi-purpose customer touchpoint for marketing, sales and service, this data indicates something else of interest to brand marketers and customer experience experts as well.

There is still a significant portion of the population that many marketers cannot ignore. Though skewing older, less educated and less affluent as a group, their buying power is still substantial.  And the marketing touchpoints that will get them to sit up and take notice don’t reside on a CRT hooked up to the World Wide Web.

Though we’re not huge proponents of broadcast brand building, the direct marketing ability of TV is proven, as is print direct.  As with any brand strategy or marketing effort, knowing who your customers are and how to best reach each segment is the key to drawing them through your customer relationship lifecycle; from awareness and acquisition to satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

Still, with 93% of the under 30 crowd online and connected, I’d think twice before positioning any new products to an audience that’s literally dying off…

In public relations, there is a little-known segment of experts whose jobs are essentially to keep their clients names (and deeds) out of the light of public scrutiny. These men and women are almost never quoted or noted, yet they are powerful enough to pull feats worthy of David Blain by causing major negative events to literally disappear in plain sight.

Every so often in the branding world, a similar feat occurs. What do you do when your brand strategy is to be invisible, or you need to remove traces or connections of a brand to negative events? Changing your name is one way to do it; simply turn to your brand strategist of choice for guidance. But it only works if you keep your mouth shut.

Take for instance Altria Group, formerly known as Philip Morris.

This company’s innocuous logo and unassuming name tells you nothing about who they are or what they do. There’s a reason for this: the once-respected Philip Morris brand (the biggest member of the Big Tobacco club) needed to duck under cover from a constant barrage of media scrutiny and legal attacks. Unlike their competitor Lorillard Corp. which has always tried to keep a low profile, Philip Morris spent years building its brand around cigarettes and beer (“the companies of your pleasures”).

Reinventing its brand as a brand representing “nothing” was a Seinfeld-esque stroke of genius. As Altria, the company is now able to fully express its altruistic side, because non-profit organizations that had previously distanced themselves from Philip Morris were (and are) only too happy to accept grants from Altria. And best of all, the Philip Morris name wasn’t gone entirely; it could be trotted out to take the blame for corporate sins and then retired to the closet.

An unfortunate (though extremely impressive) example of marketing smarts trumping morals, as the biggest name in tobacco literally disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Corporate Culture Rules: Why Xe will likely forever remain “the company formerly known as Blackwater.”

Then you have Xe. Founded as Blackwater Group, Xe is a multi-billion dollar corporation built by CEO Eric Prince into one of the largest military contractors in the world over 6 short but tumultuous years. But the last few years have been hard on their image. As five former Blackwater employees prepared to defend themselves on charges of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, civil suits and negative press abounded. What to do? Change your name. Company spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said Blackwater was changing its name because “the idea is to define the company as what it is today and not what it used to be.”

Better tell that to the CEO. Not the kind of man to hide quietly and wait anything out, former navy SEAL and billionaire auto parts heir Eric Prince took up several pages in this month’s Vanity Fair pointing out how unfairly he and his firm have been treated. That’s all well and good – but if the point of your name change is to lower your profile, well, you need to lower your profile.

Lesson learned?

Two of the three “legs” of the brand experience triangle are related to the corporation. The vision comes from the top, and ideally closely aligns with employees to drive a consistent corporate culture. We suspect that Xe has these two nailed down nice and tight. But the other leg – customer experience – is the one that drives how the world sees you. In Xe’s case, their direct customers – primarily the U.S. Government – still seem to be happy with what they’re getting. But their indirect customers – the taxpayers who ultimately pay Xe’s bills – are getting another perception entirely.

Brands succeed most powerfully when they align with the passion of their people, and tap into the passion of their customers. Just look at Apple or Pixar. But sometimes, it’s best to keep your passion, and your point of view, under wraps.

I grant you, we brand strategist and consulting types are doing a great job confusing corporate marketers. Now they can’t focus on driving sales through the door until they figure out how to make a “Lovemark.” Customer intimacy is more important than customer relationships, and those are pretty important too. Now there’s the “Love Triangle Model.” Throw emotional contagion into the mix, and we’re going to have brand-based STD’s next… (are phishing and pharming the equivalent?)

Maybe it’s a little too much to ask, but do I really want “love” from (or with) a brand? Maybe I’m just a little uncomfortable with these new levels of brand intimacy. Call me old fashioned, but these are all just new ways to describe the same old thing: Create a product or deliver a service that solves a real need. Support it with honesty, integrity and quality, and make sure you respond quickly to customer needs, delivering a consistent, differentiated brand experience across all your customer touchpoints.

Make sure your market knows that you do this, and encourage them to tell others. Conduct loyalty and brand research to make sure you know what your customers think and how they feel about you vs. your competition, and act on the results.

No offense, but can’t we save these “sweet nothings” for our wives, husbands and significant others? After all, if you want this kind of involvement, where would you rather turn for fulfillment? I know where I’d rather go. I’ll give you hint: it’s not Amazon. And if this trend towards unwanted intimacy keeps up, we can always create new meaning for “brand therapy.” We’ll need it.

To keep these experiences (and brand perceptions) positive and appropriate, companies must consistently touch customers and prospects in ways that build satisfaction, trust and loyalty, at each stage of their Customer Relationship Lifecycle. This systematic process creates expectations that must be regularly met, resulting in customer confidence and an emotional connection–the foundation for all successful brands.

The downside, of course, is when good Touchpoints go bad. How many customers can you lose due to dissatisfaction to a call center employee with an attitude, or an accent they cannot understand?

You get it. It’s pretty simple, really: Managing the brand experience across all Touchpoints matters.

While appropriately positioning the organization and the development of a branding and messaging platform are critical first steps, there must also be steadfast, across-the-board organizational commitment to developing and implementing the structure, systems, and staffing needed to effectively deliver on the promise.

Our experience shows us that the benefits of making and keeping a brand promise are well worth it. Here’s a quick primer on our point-of-view:

Defining (and Making) the Promise. Your promise needs to be relevant, compelling, believable and achievable – and supported by the values that drive your organization – to make a deep connection with your target audiences. To define it, you must understand your organization, your customers and your competition.

Delivering the Promise. The responsibility for delivering the promise message falls primarily on the sales and marketing team, while management and employees in the field deliver on the elements of the promise on a daily basis.

Keeping the Promise. Your success hinges on the competency and commitment of line staff, IT, call center, outsourced vendors, etc. to deliver on the promise at each Touchpoint. So much of your relationship with customers, and of your ability to keep your promises to them, will depend on the precise coordination and structure of your systems and staff. Leverage the processes, procedures and systems needed to effectively communicate with each other, and your customers will experience the positive results.

Feedback: Have we kept our promise? The only way to know that you are making, delivering, and keeping the right promises is to continually get feedback from your customers. Utilizing Customer Listening Tools – including those in MCorp’s Customer Experience Mapping toolkit – can be qualitative, or it can be a formal, quantitative process for measuring gaps between customer satisfaction, attitudes, and needs. Finally, processes must be in place for easily and systematically collecting, reviewing, and acting upon this feedback.

Those organizations that successfully connect with customers and deliver on a relevant promise reap huge, quantifiable benefits in areas such as retention, loyalty, customer NPV (“Net Present Value”) and LCV (“Lifetime Customer Value”). The flip side for those organizations which promise one thing and deliver an experience that just doesn’t match up is the cynicism, increased churn, and reduced loyalty and satisfaction which can negatively affect relationships with both internal (employees) and external (customers, analysts, partners, etc.) audiences.

I’ve heard executives talk about the importance strategic planning is given within an organization, and I’ve seen much of the impressive output from expensive consultants.

And while it’s easy to bash these 100-plus page PowerPoint “paper bricks” that often end up gathering dust when some other consulting firm produces them, my tune changes pretty quickly when it’s our recommendations sitting neglected on the shelf.

The fact is, great strategy – whether brand, marketing, customer experience or business management oriented  – can only succeed if it’s actually implemented. When something goes wrong or nothing happens, it can leave the organization unchanged or (even worse) only partway through a critical process.

A recent engagement with a growing financial services firm drove this point home … again. Where does it go wrong? While we see our job as the planners and champions of change, it takes internal leadership and motivation to drive it. Great leadership is about implementing change as well as developing the strategies to create change. You can’t have one without the other.

But not all leaders are naturally equipped, or empowered, to deal with the challenges that this role will throw at them. Whatever their “official” role (whether you’re leading from the top or the middle), leaders need to be able to drive strategic change in their organizations, and motivate others to join them.

I’m thinking we need to add a role to our toolbox: just call me Coach!

A deep understanding of the importance of alignment between the customer experience and brand promise is evidenced by the nearly one-hundred percent of customers who responded in a recent MCorp Consulting survey who – through a series of research methodologies, across retail customer segments – stated that this relationship strongly affected their perception of an organization.

At the same time, just over half of the organizations we’ve worked with feel that they are performing extremely well in this regard. In short, the more accurately aligned the customer experience is with the brand promise (and their expectations of the brand that your promise implies) the greater the positive influence your brand will have on your customer relationships.

How well aligned are your brand and customer touchpoints?

Taking a look at your own company, how closely aligned do you think experience and brand are? If you deliver what you promise across all your touchpoints, then you’re part of a thriving minority. Congratulations! But maybe there’s some discontinuity. Or perhaps you don’t know. If that’s the case, there are questions to ask to help you find the answers.

• Does your brand accurately reflect the relationship your customers feel they have with you?
• Do your employees deliver your brand in the same way customers feel about it?
• Does management “buy into” your brand?
• Does your market perception and brand promise match the brand experience across all your touchpoints?
• What do your customers think of you vs. your competition?

For those organziations who get this connection, the threads that drive success are a combination of direction and obsession. Top-down direction from a leadership team that both understands and values the customer experience. And obsession on the part of everyone in an organization when it comes to delivering a consistent, branded customer experience.

From back-office operations and the call center to front-line, customer-facing staff, obsession with experience delivery and “expectation management” across touchpoints and interactions is a hallmark of customer experience leaders, across industries.

The message stands out against commercials that attempt to hammer viewers over the head with products and services or annoy with bouncy jingles. We’ve learned to tune those out, and just wish they would go away.

However, State Farm Insurance breaks through the noise with a simple, classic song, using a series of images featuring people just like us – “helping each other” – receiving care from the “real people” at State Farm.

On many levels, State Farm gets it right with this spot. Emotionally appealing, great soundtrack and a great job showing product benefits – where many financial services marketers hit the wall. From a branding perspective, they nail it. “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.”

1) Supporting retention, existing customers are reassured: “If something terrible happens, State Farm will ‘be there’ for me. I’m glad this is my insurance company.”

2) Boosting acquisition, potential customers may find the emotional plea of this commercial irresistible: “Real people, just like me, will take care of me and my family – State Farm is real people. I’m going to call them, or check them out on the web.”

3) And when it comes brand awareness and relevance, all viewers see that State Farm Insurance is for people of all ages, all colors, and provides support across a wide variety of situations: “I’m not planning to switch insurance companies, but if I did, I think this is a ‘human’ company and I would consider State Farm.”

Our only complaints? First, why do they wait to get to the sponsor ‘till the last frames? I don’t think folks are sitting in front of their HDs wondering to themselves who this is… “Let’s wait and see, honey – I wonder what these guys are selling? We might want to buy some…”

Second – and more troubling – is that on the website featured in the spot (the main State Farm site) the brand promise-slash-tagline so powerfully supported by this spot is conspicuous by its absence. No tie-in at all. Why walk away from such a powerfully differentiated position? State Farm could benefit from a little integrated marketing and cross-channel brand strategy help…

What do you think? Does this State Farm Insurance commercial stir your emotions? Or is it just another emotionally touching :90 spot that leaves most viewers wondering what’s being sold?

In fact, earlier this year Forrester Research reported that B2B buyers have very high social participation; this presentation on Slideshare (“Using Buyer Social Behavior to Boost B2B Social Media Success”)   outlines their 4-step approach, as well as Forrester’s Social Technographics ladder, a segmentation slice of online users based on their likelihood to leverage and/or participate in social media in business decision making.

The conclusion is simple: “If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you’re late.”

B2B social media touchpoint examples: Different approaches, common goals.

Social media touchpoints needn’t look like your teenage daughter’s MySpace page. Nor should they – but that doesn’t mean B2B marketers can’t make us laugh.

IBM (Consulting and Products) The now-famous “Art of the Sale Series” shows the fun side of IBM in their videos, a take-off on “The Office.”

Accenture (Consulting)

Global consulting firm Accenture has entered the social media world with several employee-written blogs, including a “Consulting Analyst Video Blog” , along with other tools and channels focused on sectors, clients, prospective employees, and others.

• Accenture Blogs
• Accenture’s Blog for Green IT
• An Accenture Developer’s Journal
• Consulting Analyst Video Blog

Kelly Services (Staffing)

Kelly Services takes a slightly different approach.

Although their client list is comprised of Fortune 500 companies, Kelly has focused social media efforts on improving the “product” (employees) with videos aimed at honing job interview skills by showing humorous videos of interviews going awry. The videos can be found on their website for job seekers called getajobthatdoesntsuck.com.

Kelly can also be found on Facebook.

And YouTube

Boomers = mainstream = safe for B2B

Now that popular social media tools Facebook and Twitter have been invaded by Baby Boomers, we can safely conclude that these sites are now “mainstream” and “safe” for even the most skeptical B2B marketers.

According to the post “Are Baby Boomers Killing Facebook and Twitter?” , Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project,  says:

“Boomers are the mainstream of the country now,” says Rainie. “When you attract a mainstream audience, you’re going to attract a lot more commercial interests. Boomers validate that this is a big market, and that this is a place where commercial interests can make money.”

Bottom Line: If you’re not in, you’re already late.

No matter your industry, if you’re in B2B (or B2C or Non-Profit, or…) and you are not yet leveraging some of these tools, then you’re late. But it’s not too late.

Though wildly successful at connecting people, businesses in general are still feeling their way through the options. Even though most businesses won’t  see immediate sales, the ability to drive awareness and influence your audiences is high. From micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter) to You Tube, and Facebook to LinkedIn, the range of touchpoints is broad, and the ability measure influence and activity is high.

Which leaves us with one question: What is your social media strategy?