Sometimes people just want what they expect and to get on with their lives.

I’ve never felt comfortable with that marketing mantra, “delight your customers.” Although surely sometimes that’s in order (such as when you’re launching in a competitive market, or in a customer service encounter), delight is fickle and wears off almost instantly. In fact you might say that delight causes a brand to raise the bar on itself with every use. That can get really expensive in brandland.

Most of the time customers simply want your brand to meet their expectations and let them get on with their lives. Just like air. Air is invisible, we take it for granted, but when it’s not there, we get a little upset. That’s what most brand experiences should be like: transparent, yet mission critical.

I don’t know about you, but if I had to be “delighted” with every brand experience, I’d be desensitized before noon on Monday.  Doesn’t it make more sense to simply meet or beat customer expectations with consistent brand performance?

Instead of impressing me with new delights, focus your efforts on keeping me loyal. For instance, if I hit a little snag in my brand experience, make sure customer service comes through with single-call resolution. That’s a pretty cheap solution for the brand and may get me to mention my satisfaction to a  friend or two…and word of mouth branding is “(bleeping) golden!”

Would you agree that consistency is more important and more realistic than delight? OK, maybe you want to inspire an occasional delight…a mild delight….a slight-smile-at-the-edges-of-your-mouth-for-half-a-second delight. But a lot of time that can simply result from a situation in which your customer strays from your brand, experiences dissatisfaction elsewhere, and comes back to your brand…the delight of realizing yours is a brand that can be trusted (“there’s no place like home”).

What do you think about consistently delighting customers? Is it realistic? Blog it here.

For more on this subject, there’s a great article in July’s Harvard Business Review. http://hbr.org/product/stop-trying-to-delight-your-customers/an/R1007L-PDF-ENG

Is your personal brand distinctive?

If a friend or business associate were to describe you to a complete stranger, what would they say? Does considering that make you feel a little paranoid?

Many of us professional marketing folks spend a good deal of time working on our commercial brands. But branding isn’t just for business any more. Even if you’re not looking for a new gig, defining your personal brand is seen by many experts as a new “must do” for success in your personal and professional lives. With a solid personal brand, you can be sure how you’ll be characterized, even when you’re not there. But how do you build a strong personal brand?

When you think about it, a personal brand can be a confusing concept. After all, between our personal, professional and family relationships, we fulfill different roles at different times, often switching between them from one minute to the next. But we tend to trust people who behave consistently and predictably most of the time. So how can one person have a unified personal brand that works in all facets of their lives?

Strong brands of any kind are made of three essential ingredients: Focus, distinction, and trust. That means focusing on one central “What do I stand for?” idea; being distinctly different from other brands that compete in the same consideration set; and performing in a consistent way that lives up to your promises.

“Managing Brand U: 7 Steps to creating your most successful self,” by Jerry S. Wilson and Ira Blumenthal presents a well-organized and easy-to-follow process for building a solid personal brand. I like it because it follows many of the best practices we espouse at StudioNorth in our brand-building process for commercial clients. In a 2008 blog post, Wilson writes, “We all have the opportunity to determine how others see us. We are in charge of our own brand. The space between how you are viewed by other people and how you want to be viewed by other people is the place where you begin to build your brand.” We refer to this “space between” as a “brand gap.” Identifying brand gaps reveals the opportunities to strengthen your brand with fine tuning and unity.

Following best practices, Wilson encourages his followers to do some personal brand research by asking several of your closest friends for a candid list of 25 words that best describe you. Then do the same for yourself. Compare, and find your “brand gaps.” We suggest you also do the same in your work life and family. This creates a somewhat more complex brand map, but really helps reconcile the many “brands of you.” And it provides direction for strengthening your personal brand—closing those brand gaps with image, language, and actions that are consistent with your desired perceived brand.

What’s your personal brand in 10 words or less? Blog it here today. Then ask your friends and family for a few words on what they think you stand for. Compare and find the gaps. You may be surprised!

For more on this directly from Jerry Wilson, visit http://bit.ly/9v5AHK

Isaiah Mustafa, the second most interesting man in the world

The phrase “making it go viral” speaks to some hard facts about social media marketing. Guiding and launching viral efforts takes a lot more than a well directed sneeze. The excerpt below from ReadWriteWeb reveals a behind-the-scenes look at what it took to make the enormously successful Old Spice campaign go viral.

July, 14, 2010
“A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Even 4chan loved it. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that’s just over 7 minutes (production time) per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now.…You can already get an Old Spice Man voicemail message generated for your phone. The coolest thing about that? That system wasn’t even created by Old Spice or (the agency) – it was built by a crowd of users at social news site Reddit this afternoon.”

Old Spice beats Obama

The Stats

• Number of videos made: 180+
• Number of video views: 5.9 million
• Number of comments: 22,500

These guys were making videos in real time and posting them as responses to live comments from social media conversations. They selected the most visible or highest-rated respondents to the campaign (such as the likes of Alyssa Milano) to leverage the exponential effect of their huge social network followings.

This campaign follows a formula that seems to be emerging in social media: Find an issue or create one, use entertainment as the sticky stuff, leverage social media influencers to spread the word, recognize some high-profile influencers in your responses – and do it all in real time…or as close to it as you can.

Sound like a big commitment? You bet. Social media can be the most demanding of all media and we’re still not sure of the payback. In the case of Old Spice, awareness and a change of brand image were top goals. My grandfather used to wear Old Spice. I still won’t wear it because of that. But my kids are crazy about it, because to them The Most Interesting Man in the World 2.0, Isaiah Mustafa, is now the embodiment (in all ways) of Old Spice…the most edgy brand in the category, thanks to an exhausting and explosive social media play. I’d like to see the awareness and brand metrics on that.

Any other examples of a peek behind the scenes of a successful viral effort?

For the complete story, see http://bit.ly/bkUHfH

In his groundbreaking 2009 book, “The Shift,” Scott Davis identified a pivotal shift in brand strategy, from “controlling the brand message” to “galvanizing your network.” Much of this shift is due to the emergence of social media as a powerful new customer advocacy platform.

Social media has given consumers and B2B customers unprecedented power to reshape brand messages without guidance or consent from the brand. Because of this power, the brand must “galvanize its network” to be in touch with its customers every second: gaining awareness of their issues, taking them seriously, and taking decisive action to achieve customer satisfaction and maintain loyalty. In other words, it’s more important than ever before to be vigilant about brand alignment, continuously assessing and addressing the gap between brand promise and brand performance

Does this shift imply that brand messaging as we know it is dead? Or instead, does it mean that it’s time to get serious about addressing the true scope of brand: not just brand promise, but the entire customer experience from awareness through loyalty. It may even mean that the customer AIDAS model (Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action, Satisfaction) now works both ways. The brand needs to allow for the fact that customers will use this model in the “back channel” of social media to publicly evaluate the brand’s promise vs. performance.

With today’s digital media, it is now possible to achieve what we refer to as “real time brand alignment metrics.” A future version of 9align Message Mapper software will incorporate real time brand alignment metrics capabilities, where users can actually see the alignment gap (what your messaging says v what your stakeholders say) on a near-real-time basis.

What do you think? Is brand messaging dead? Or will it continue to be essential to help guide customer conversations and galvanize networks? Is the objective of brand messaging changing from “puffed and buffed spin” to education, relevant information, and customer-driven positioning? Will this shift force brands to take more seriously alignment between brand promise and performance?  Blog it here, on frenchonbrand. Feel free to retweet!