It’s all about people

I was re-reading bits of Wally Olins’ On Brand book, and again, I get more and more convinced that people play a key, if not the most important role in delivering great services:

In order to get an effective service brand, people have to be taught to live the brand they work with. For the customer, the person who represents the brand is the brand. If he or she doesn’t perform properly, the relationship between the brand and the customer may collapse. The skills required to teach staff to live the brand have much more in common with managing people than with conventional marketing manager

This is why with a product brand you can spend 75% of you time, money and energy trying to influence consumers and 25% on everything else, while with a service brand you have to spend at least 50% of your time and money influencing your own people. The priorities are the other way around. In a product brand, the customer comes first. But in a service brand, your own people come first.

At Engine, we’ve done a few projects to get employees to live the brand. We’ve helped Orange to train their staff in Spain to behave in an Orange way through a highly interactive training workshop. More details on this project here.