Brand Recall

Too many managers attribute Brand Building to flaky concepts like Positioning, Brand Relevance, Brand Vitality and so on. The more sophisticated will talk about Optimised TRPs and Media-Mix Modelling, or whatever. These terms sound grand and edifying to the human spirit, but in practice, mean little else. 

In some of my most rigorous training in Sales at Marketing managing all the inbound marketing for Dell in Asia Pacific, I heard my client say repeatedly: First Demand, then Brand. The logic is very simple - it says that the simplest way to build a brand is to get people to buy it - in the process of getting them to buy it, make the experience so great, (get a great price point, give great advice during the buying process, throw in freebies, give gratifying after-sales service - one can do many things) that they will come back to you. This particularly true in certain industries - Low Cost Airlines, for example - it matters little if the Ad-artwork is fabulous or has the right layout or whatever - the key task for the brand is to maximise the Brand-Experience once it has snared a potential customer. Organisations need to pay keen attention to the Brand Experience, and institute mechanisms to redress issues of sub-optimal brand experience. In Dell, for example, there was a large team called ” Customer Advocacy” who were paid to stir up hell within the system when customer complaints came in.

Much can go wrong. The easiest part is the Brand Promise. The harder part, the part with all the details, and those that have far stronger consumer impact, are downstream from that initial branding aperture. A fine brand of canned soup described in Full-Page colour ad designed by the best advertising agency in the world, may be found in a dented and dusty condition on the bottom shelf of a supermarket. An Ad describing a gracious hotel chain may be belied by the behavior of a surly concierge - the examples can be endless.

Brand Building, therefore, calls for far more than Brand Image building. It calls for managing every Brand Contact that the customer might have with the brand. Jan Carlzon, former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) expressed this well in his book Moment of Truth. When he managed SAS, he saw his challenge as making sure that the airlines 5 million passengers every year who met an average of 5 Airline employees - this made for 25 Million Brand Contacts - on each occasion experienced a positive Moment of Truth.