CHAT BACK: Delivering the brand experience

I was browsing retail experiences this weekend. I like to call it research; you can call it shopping, if you like. ‘Tis the season of course, and I make a habit of it throughout the year. Usually it’s just a few hours, but this weekend was a retail safari -- from the dense thickets of Surry Hills boutiques to the wide savannah of the big malls.

Anyway, I was wandering around, looking for Xmas presents and mentally checking off the list of service basics in each store – how was I greeted, how well did they read my mood and my needs, did they seem to actually like whatever they were selling, and so on.

I met some attentive sales people and some rude ones, some people who seemed smart and some who really didn’t, and I met a few people I wouldn’t mind hanging out with again. Mostly we experience these people as individuals.

If we go regularly to those stores or encounter the same experience in other outlets of the same brand, then we’ll start to build up a pattern in our minds – this brand’s service tends to be good or that brand’s tends to be bad.

As professionals we’ll have ideas about hiring, training and management practices that create these service cultures, but as consumers the pattern recognition is more straight-forward: avoid the bad experiences, repeat the good ones.

So far so ‘Service 101.’

What struck me this weekend were the places where I felt I was actually experiencing a brand idea, rather than just encountering a few individuals.

There was a boutique selling travel accessories where the bright, quirky product offering was matched perfectly by the high-energy enthusiasm of the staff. They managed to make security-screening requirements seem like a clever and stylish game.

The staff saw their role in creating a world where travel was fun again, where jet-setting was a desirable part of my own personal brand. Several friends will be getting useful little travel cases for Xmas this year.

Then there was a lingerie store where sales staff managed to make the customers, in all our variously-sized and shaped ways, feel like we were each a perfect, precious item being gift-wrapped for some special, almost ritual event. We were being attended on by priestesses in a pagan temple. There should have been an altar. You get the picture. We certainly did.

I also visited two outlets of a chain of women’s clothing stores, offering a style that doesn’t generally appeal to me – overtly feminine in a slightly fifties way, layers of accessories, flowers made of sequins, that sort of thing.

In both stores the staff not only wore the clothes, they embodied and shared the personality of the brand, with flair: we were girls dressing up, staff brought us things to try on, they were conspiratory and encouraging in their tone, there was some giggling. I got carried away and am now looking for an occasion to wear little gloves. Or perhaps they’d make a nice gift…

I’m not the target audience at Deus either, but that experience seems to function in a similar way for some of my motor-enthusiast friends: a gathering of kindred spirits, with the testosterone equivalent of giggling.

The difference in all these stores was that the staff weren’t just nice or not nice, service wasn’t just good or bad. In these stores the staff understood the specific brand idea and had a clear vision of the intended customer experience. So they could work creatively, in the moment, to deliver that differentiated experience.

Charles Darwin said, "In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."

In the long history of brand delivery, too.

We know it can be done. Starbucks’ initial surge of popularity and growth was largely shaped by the now-famous ‘Third Place’ video: the organization hired good staff, treated them well and actually SHOWED them what the brand was trying to do for its customers. The strategy was genius in its simplicity.

I worked for several years with Starwood Hotels & Resorts, whose portfolio of different hotel brands are delivered by separate ‘brand’ teams and supported by shared ‘operations’ teams.

Each brand’s intended customer experience is defined for the staff and summed up in three words that they can use as filters for their own decisions. If a brand is meant to offer a ‘flirty, insider escape’ then the implications can be unpacked for everything from reception greeting, to choice of cocktails in the bar.

Then of course there’s Apple: staff who understand and love the brand idea, delivering a customer experience that illustrates the best qualities of that brand. (I deserve some credit for getting this far before mentioning Apple, surely?)

What struck me this weekend was that this kind of creativity and purpose doesn’t have to be rare; these qualities are innate in human beings. What allowed our species to swarm over this planet was our ability to use tools and gather around ideas.

And most organizations actually have the tools that service staff need. Brand teams have strategies for attracting and retaining customers, supporting price premiums or increasing share of wallet. Marketing departments often have rich profiles of the customer’s needs and wants.

Communications teams paint compelling pictures of the brand vision. We just need to give all this to the frontline teams who actually execute on an hour-by-hour basis, pulling together and each making the right decisions to deliver the intended customer experience.