What do they say about your company online? What does the local media say about it? How do your neighbors talk about your company at weekend barbeques? When your marketing is telling the story, customers talk about what your company does. However, when your marketing is making up a story, customers talk about what your company did.
For example, Burger King’s recent marketing activities, ranging from the Subservient Chicken Web site to the television commercials featuring “The King,” make up stories about the Burger King business. These advertising messages are diversionary marketing tactics designed to get consumers to focus on the kooky, creative commercials Burger King did and not on the food Burger King does.
Taco Bell does the same thing, but in a much less interesting way—they show, with their TV and print advertising, sizzling hot grills, freshly picked produce, and freshly grated cheese going into their dishes. It’s a far cry from the sealed plastic bags containing precooked portions shipped from mammoth distribution centers, which Taco Bell simply heats and serves by tossing the bags into boiling water. It’s clear that they’ve made up a story. Chipotle, on the other hand, makes the food in front of you. You can see the freshness, the quality, and the company reinforces what it does with the story of its marinated meats printed on its cups. It knows there are lots of people with a passion for simple, freshly prepared, and delicious Tex-Mex food, and it over-delivers on the expected fast-food promise.
The big beer companies, Budweiser, Miller, and Coors, also provide a readily familiar example. It’s easy to recognize a lack of authentic passion for the beers they produce from their advertising that relies so heavily on the sophomoric interests of young men and other wildly irrelevant diversionary tactics, funny though they often are. When they do attempt to focus on the actual product in their marketing, the vague, often confusing descriptions leave the viewing consumer with precious little to be interested in. Flavor is a hard thing to communicate verbally, but when one beer brand touts having “more flavor”—not malty, rich, hoppy, or sweet, just “more flavor”—and another resorts to claiming it has the “coldest tasting” beer, you know something’s wrong. Their approach to beer is akin to how coffee was viewed before Starbucks came on the scene—a cold, foamy, fizzy, yellowish liquid that serves as an alcohol delivery vehicle.
Compare their “stories” to what independent brewer Samuel Adams tells its followers. If you’ve seen or read their advertising, or noticed the words on their bottles, it’s easy to understand what they’re all about—better beer. Much as Starbucks paved the way for the specialty coffee industry, Samuel Adams has been at the forefront of the microbrew renaissance of the last 20 years. Samuel Adams did it by being passionate about better beer, and it succeeded in communicating its passion by just telling us its story.
Companies that tell their story in a meaningful and genuine manner become endearing and enduring, while companies that make up stories are fleeting and in seemingly desperate need of attention. Which would you rather have your business associated with: endearing and enduring or fleeting and desperate?
Leading Questions …
What is your company’s story? What is it, ultimately, that motivated its founding and exemplifies the passion of its reason for existing?
How does your company communicate its true, authentic story to its customers and employees?
In what ways, if any, has it been guilty of “making up stories” in its marketing?
Branding is a nebulous term. Brand as a noun and branding as a verb have different meanings to different people in different departments at different companies.
Because everyone has a different understanding of what a brand is and what a brand does, the Starbucks marketing department views brand management as reputation management.
Starbucks marketers have learned that everyone, no matter what department they work in, understands the word reputation and all the feelings associated with it. People, places, and things with solid reputations are admired, respected, and trusted, while those with tarnished reputations are viewed as lacking integrity and shunning responsibility.
The same goes for brands. Strong brands are associated with upstanding, character-rich words like “genuineness,” “reliability,” “virtuous,” and “empathetic.” While weak brands are linked to dishonorable words such as “insincere,” “forgettable,” and “shallow.”
Measuring the reputation of a brand can and should be as simple as measuring the reputation of a company—something that is earned through purposeful execution and not merely fabricated to exploit a worthwhile business opportunity. Just as the Starbucks brand evolved out of the company’s high ideals—more as a by-product of the business than as a prerequisite for company growth—its reputation came about naturally as well. The actions Starbucks took to satisfy its customers, assist its employees, and foster good community relationships all worked toward building a positive company reputation.
Because Starbucks cares about its customers, it treats them as intelligent, discerning individuals. This caring not only shows in its quest to deliver the best coffee possible, but in the peripherals, such as store design. Neighborhood to neighborhood, the store decor changes because the essence of the surroundings changes. A store in Taos, New Mexico, for example, might display works by local artists on its walls, while one in the near south side of Chicago may have a blues theme to it. Yes, the looks are different, but the stores are the same in the way they acknowledge and reflect the culture and interests of the customers they serve.
Because Starbucks cares about its employees, it offers all of them—full-time and part-time workers alike—complete benefits packages, including health care and stock options. And because Starbucks cares about the communities it does business in, it takes an active role in charity involvement, from toy and book drives to fundraisers to sponsoring its employees in local volunteer efforts.
This type of corporate behavior doesn’t seem “corporate”; it seems, well, “human,” and it earns the respect and trust from customers, employees, and communities. Starbucks’ reputation grew by its actions—what it did for people inside and outside the company—not by what it said about itself.
Starbucks marketers have learned that viewing brand management as reputation management goes a long way toward fostering alignment across all business units inside a company as to what a brand is and, more important, what a strong brand can do. And when positive brand reputations are nurtured, they create a virtuous cycle that not only attracts a growing base of customers but quality people who want to become part of, and devoted to, the company.
Leading Questions …
What is the reputation of your business from a customer perspective and from an employee perspective? Do they differ? If so, how and why?
What could your business do to improve its reputation on both the customer front and the employee front?
How does your company define its brand? Does the reputation of your company’s brand match the reputation of your company?
Starbucks did not create the specialty coffee category in the United States. But by 1996 Starbucks clearly emerged as the leading specialty coffee retailer. And it established this leadership position not by creating interest in the Starbucks brand, but rather by creating intrigue with the specialty coffee category.
It sounds counterintuitive to promote the category before the brand but, as marketing consultants Al and Laura Ries point out in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, “Customers don’t care about new brands, they care about new categories.” Customers looking to be part of the “new best thing” are looking for a totally new experience, not just a new product.
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