Brand Advocacy the Apple and Amazon Way

Sometimes I get tired of seeing Amazon and Apple at or near the top of various brand rankings. It just seems like a cliche. So I received a much-needed jolt of reality this morning on my morning commute.

I was reading Groundswell on my Kindle. As the train reached 125th St., I noticed my seatmate looking at me. That usually means that the person needs to move past and exit the train, so I asked him if he was getting off. He said that he was actually looking at my Kindle and that it reminded him of his wife’s recent experience with her Kindle. Apparently, she was reading while exercising, and dropped it. Although the device didn’t shatter, the side controls were loosened, and her Kindle was unusable.

Hoping that it might be repairable, she called Amazon customer service. To her amazement, the Customer Service rep said not to worry–just mail the broken Kindle to them, and they would replace it. Two days later, her replacement arrived, with all of the books in her original Kindle intact. My seatmate and I agreed that Amazon was quite generous in their terms.

(In fact, I was curious enough to check out the Kindle warranty on the Amazon site. It is quite open to interpretation, and customer service would be within their rights to claim that dropping it on a treadmill or elliptical machine wasn’t covered in the warranty.)

Continuing on the subject of great customer service, the same gentleman began talking about a similar experience with the Apple Powerbook that he purchased for his college bound daughter. The laptop arrived the week before she was to head off to school in California. When she turned it on, it was clear that something was very wrong with the hard drive. It was now Friday afternoon, and she was due to leave in five days. Her father called Apple customer service in a bit of a panic.

Again, the customer service rep was totally reassuring. The rep informed the father that someone from DHL would arrive at their home by 6:00 p.m. with a box that would fit the laptop, that he ship it back to Apple, and that a replacement would arrive by the following Tuesday. The father emphasized to the rep that his daughter was leaving for school on Wednesday morning, so there was no margin of error.

Sure enough, the laptop arrived on Tuesday as promised. He said that this experience alone persuaded him that a Mac was worth the large price differential over a comparable Dell or HP.

By now, we had arrived at Grand Central Terminal. As I walked to work, it occurred to me that my seatmate is a genuine advocate for both Apple and Amazon. Customers like this is what all companies yearn for. What made both of these examples so great was that it had nothing to do with “features and benefits”. What drove his loyalty to these two technical devices was the interaction with human beings in customer service.

All the brand strategy, advertising, brochures, cool websites in the world cannot improve on the personal interaction with a brand. It is clear that in a purposeful way, both Apple and Amazon create engaged employees. Engaged employees are infectious in the best possible way–they pass along their infection to customers.

My hat is off to both of them.

Branding Brilliance from Mary Kay

My daughter and I were on a drive for a college visit. I was in the center lane of a three-lane Westchester County parkway. Before I knew it I was passed on the left by a most unusual SUV. At first, I thought that the sun was affecting my eyes, but, yes, driving along in distinctive splendor was a pink Cadillac Escalade.

My daughter gasped and said, “Is that a pink car?”. “Yes”, I replied, “it belongs to a super salesperson for Mary Kay”. Susannah immediately asked whether anyone could buy a car that color, and my response was that it was unique to Mary Kay.

I had always heard about the pink cars, but had never seen one. I had assumed that they would be awful-looking, but that was the wrong assumption. Pink the Escalade was, but it was tasteful, and believe me, it stood out from every other car on the road. It conjured up so many positive attributes as well:

• Cadillac is an American car, and Mary Kay embodies the American dream. Good for her for not handing out a Lexus to her top salespeople
• Pink is Mary Kay’s signature color, and this particular shade was so special that it remains in my mind over a week later
• This is a business that encourages and–better yet–rewards the entrepreneurial spirit. Whoever was driving must be an incredibly successful person and clearly an advocate for the Mary Kay brand

All of those associations came crowding in within seconds. Although there was a discreet “Mary Kay” on the rear of the vehicle, it was unostentatious. Bravo!

Mary Kay doesn’t advertise. It is sold on a one-to-one basis. I have no idea how to calculate the collective impressions each time the vehicle is seen in the area, but I bet it’s worth a lot.  You gotta love the clarity of purpose and creativity behind this program. And my guess is that it grew organically, not as an overt way to “raise awareness of the brand”. Mary Kay was a woman ahead of her time in more ways than one!

The Ten Brands I Give Thanks For

It’s Thanksgiving day, and although it sounds frivolous, I have spent the last few days thinking about what brands I really care about, that make a positive difference in my life, and that perform against higher standards than most. This is highly unscientific, personal, and random. But these companies make products that drive preference–mine at least–and stay the course in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

You will notice that the cool advertising is not  the reason these brands have been chosen. Cool advertising–or any advertising–is not the same as a brand. The same goes for the logo.

The list is in alphabetical order:

American Express For not recklessly pursuing the sub-prime market. For the wonderful Platinum card, which has earned every penny of the annual fee by giving me access to airline clubs on bad travel days. For retaining the original card member year on the face of the card.

Apple For gorgeous design, intuitive controls, and perfection in packaging. For not selling out to Intel’s co-branding dollars and keeping its advertising clean and distinctive.

Bergdorf Goodman For not contributing to the homogenization of the world and maintaining its one, spectacular and historic location. For merchandise that you can’t get elsewhere.

Felco For the best pruners in the world, in all sizes. 15 years and counting.

Google Voted in by my daughter, “because it answers all her questions,” and it’s hard to argue that. Besides, it isn’t afraid to take the logo out for a walk now and then. All I ask is that they stick with their mantra, “Don’t be evil”.

Hershey* For giving new meaning (or the original meaning) to “corporate social responsibility”. For employee retention and loyalty that few can claim. For staying true to its roots, even in extensions like the amusement park and hotel. *If they buy Cadbury and mess with the Trust, they are off the list.

Martha Stewart The brand, not the person. For inspiring me to get back in touch with my inner crafter, and make my home a better place. For an unerring eye for color, composition and quality. For products that are manufactured to high standards.

NPR For miraculous programing that brings a fresh face and point of view to whatever it covers. For Car Talk, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, Jonathan Schwartz, An American Life, all of which have kept me in my car long past the time for me to get out.

Olay For reinventing itself from an obscure, old lady brand, to a well-priced, well-researched, line of skin care products just before the recession hit. Well done!

OXO For changing forever the experience of peeling a potato–in other words, ergonomic innovation. For standing out among all the endless kitchen tools.

The minute I finish this post, I will undoubtedly come up with other winning brands. I’ll just keep them until next year.

How about you?

College and University Branding

I am the proud mother of twin daughters, who happen to be in their senior year in high school. Anyone who has gone through the college search process in the last few years is well-aware of the marketing prowess demonstrated by even the most unknown colleges. If you haven’t experienced it, you would be amazed.

Some of this we brought upon ourselves. As neither daughter seemed to comprehend the importance of good grades, we began visiting colleges after their freshman year–hoping to give them an inspiring glimpse of why exactly they were in college prep schools. Those first tours did not have the desired effect. In fact, they might have boomeranged. But not surprisingly, those early schools began to contact us regularly. Impressive follow-up.

Then my husband discovered the book, “Colleges That Change Lives“, which is a cottage industry unto itself. The book is terrific, uncovering some of the best, smaller schools that connect with their students in meaningful ways. The book came first, then the schools seemed to capitalize on it, and thus a specialized college fair was born. My husband and daughters attended one, and at the Cornell College booth, the recruiter knew of their great-aunt Geneva, who had been an renowned English professor there for 40 years. Then they visited the Ohio Wesleyan University booth, where the recruiter had been a classmate of my husband’s (back then a ne’er do well) brother, and remembered him well and fondly. Each school was more impressive than the next. Now the girls were starting to “get it”. What is so interesting about this group of schools is that they have, in effect, created a branded class that in total begins to challenge the commonly accepted top tier of schools.

As a brander, I applaud them. As a mother, I realized that many of them were beyond the academic reach or geographic interest of my daughters. And so we continued to search.

Today’s college fair (if you live near a large city) is an amazing experience. It’s like a trade show, but what is interesting is that everyone plays on an even field. Each school has a table. What they do with their table is up to them, but there is no change to create a fancy two story, over the top, booth. Business could learn a great deal from the “sales” efforts of the recruiters. The best of them have attended the school they recruit for, and they provide detailed, insightful and personal information.

Another great resource is “America’s Best Colleges for B Students“. It’s not as rigorously researched as CTCL, but there is helpful information about how and where students may access academic support and get the tools for success. We found several intriguing schools, some of which cross-referenced with CTCL, which made them even more interesting.

The best schools understand how 17-year olds today communicate, which is not always in a formal interview or a formal essay. Most have FaceBook pages, and they communicate via email–and direct phone calls. Again, this is evidence of total focus on the target audience.

We are far from done. What were the memorable experiences? High Point University, whose president is a businessman who has both a vision and a deep understanding of marketing. It may look glossy, but it is not fluffy. A surprise finalist is McDaniel College, which is both a CTCL and a “B Student” school. The information session purposely had no fancy PowerPoint or video, just an incredibly intelligent and articulate representative who focused on the school’s commitment to the holistic education of each student. Instead of being put off or intimidated by the academic excellence, my daughter found herself challenged and insprired by it. Bravo!

Right now, we are in the thick of it. The phone rings nearly every day with a recruiter or student representative from a college. Our mailbox is overloaded with post cards and brochures.

If you are a marketer, just think of the challenge. There are the Ivies, the Big Ten, the major State Universities. But there are thousands of schools under the radar, all trying desperately to stand out from the pack. The best have a deep sense of who they are, their heritage, and their vision for the future. The remainder have bought into expensive marketing communications programs, but they still have far to go. As many people say, “There is a college for everybody.” Some make their case far better than others.

The Dowser

The act of dowsing is a useful metaphor for the work of a brand strategist. 

A quick aside, in case you aren’t familiar with this term: Dowsing is a practice related to the location of underground water sources, and, less frequently, metals, ores, gemstones, or radiation fields. Dowsing is generally done with a simple tool–an L- or Y-shaped tree branch, or a similarly shaped metal rod.

Skeptics of this practice abound, of course. I would be skeptical too, except that when I was a small child, my father successfully dowsed a new well when our old one began to deliver more sand than water. I still remember his amazement when he told us that he felt a strong and unmistakeable force, pulling the rod to the ground. He drilled at that point, and water has flowed from it ever since.

So it is when a brand strategist seeks the essential truth of a corporate brand. It is our task to wander across a wide territory of information, data, opinion, emotion, and identify the force that reflects the brand.

Clients can be skeptical of us, too. At this point in my career, I have written hundreds of proposals, and always when I reach the point of explaining how we come to the positioning, I lack the words, the “steps”, the “processes” that so easily describe the rest of our work. It is impossible to estimate in advance. The proper brand idea can bubble up in the first few days of our work, or it can only be wrestled to the ground after months of agony. There is no telling in advance.

But when it is right, there is no mistaking the power that draws us to the ultimate brand idea.

Dear Kellogg’s, Please Apologize!

What on earth? I was jolted this morning when I read that the venerable Kellogg’s has blundered badly with a false nutritional claim for its Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal. This story has the potential to generate the same firestorm as the recent Twitter moms’ protest against Motrin, but instead of just an insulting ad concept, Kellogg’s has launched a multimedia marketing push that is based on bad data.

Apparently, Kellogg’s marketing? public relations? advertising? people identified that mothers today are concerned about attention issues affecting their childrens’ performance at school. Check. (I still believe that my 17 year-old has some undiagnosed ADD thingy…I will research the subject until the day I die.) Where it seems to have gone horribly wrong is that they conducted some sort of quasi-scientific research and “proved” that a breakfast including Frosted Mini-Wheats would improve a child’s attention in school by some 20%. 

In fact, this “improvement”, when checked by the FTC, was only 11%. AND THE BASIS OF COMPARISON WAS WITH CHILDREN THAT ATE NO BREAKFAST! Well, duh! Virtually any other cereal could make the same claim versus an empty stomach.

Kellogg’s has a whole website for Frosted Mini-Wheats, with a “View” type set-up with streaming video of sincere, coffee-drinking women just bursting to discuss children’s attention problems, and lots of links for more information.

I actually thought that when I went to the website, there would be some mention about the issue–or that it would have been taken down. But no. Why wasn’t Kellogg’s more prepared for this? Surely they knew that the ad was being reviewed by the FTC. The company has been “unavailable for comment”. Kellogg’s is a major, reputable brand that has spent decades building trust. They need to get in front of this as quickly as possible, and also investigate why and how a major marketing effort was built on a specious claim.

True Transparency: Recovery.gov

Have you seen it? The US government has launched a new website dedicated solely to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Well, the American people asked for more transparency, and they have got it. To quote the home page, “This is your money. You have a right to know where it is going and how it is being spent.” 

I am tempted to make a snarky comment about the past administration here, but this is a blog about branding, not politics.

Barack Obama does indeed reflect a 21st century sensibility, and it goes beyond his passion for his Blackberry. What he has done is to reinforce his brand promise of government transparency in a tangible way, using communication methods that are open, clear and easily accessible. There is opportunity for the public to both learn and engage. In the style of classic cascading communications, many government agencies have also set aside a section or page on their own websites dedicated to the Recovery Act. Not only that, his team has created a logo that will be deployed on other agency websites and literal sites (such as highway construction, I guess) where our ARRA tax dollars are at work. 

Washington is littered with logos, of course. The majority are dedicated to Departments and Agencies. (I just took a quick tour of a dozen or so, and it’s a very interesting visual exercise.) It’s unusual for legislation to be identified this way. In this regard President Obama seems to be following in the steps of the Roosevelt administration; the WPA had its own logo, too. But if you think of the impact of the Recovery.gov logo in terms of reach and frequency, it has the potential to really become top of mind to the American public in a positive way.

This is pretty classic brand-building. It remains to be seen whether the program has “legs”, whether people engage, whether communications are timely and correct. But it’s a good start.