Timeless brands make time for their customers
As brand builders, we do everything we can to create “timeless” brands. In the heat of this effort, though, it’s easy to forget that the first step to becoming a timeless brand is to make time for customers. To begin this process, a brand must recognize that its customers are not external “targets” to be aimed at. Customers are part of the brand essence, just as much as the company and its products.
Factor your customers into your brand
You make time for your customers when you include their interests in key decisions you make affecting company policies, innovation, product performance, quality and trust. The time you spend factoring your customers into your brand is time well spent. Your unique brand emerges when your customers are part of you—and vice versa. In this bond, there’s no room for competitors.
A case in point: modern watches
When it comes to making time for your customers, modern watches (some pun intended) are a case in point. I’ve come across an excellent example that I’ll detail below.
Brands function on customer time
Consider the above wristwatch. With four dials, it’s a work of engineering and watchmaking art. This particular model doesn’t need batteries, nor does it need to be wound. It’s solar powered, and can run for months once it’s been charged by light. It’s a precise chronograph, yet can also operate 300 ft. below the surface of the ocean. Similar models feature perpetual calendars, alarms, and multiple time zones. As power-packed timekeeping machines such watches work all sorts of miracles—once you figure out how to set them properly.
The set-up is the rub
Alas, the set-up is the rub. Brands function on customer time. A brand of powerful watches that doesn’t embrace customers as part of its brand essence is effectively taking its product off its customers’ wrists. From a brand perspective, the greatest feature of any watch is the customer who wears it. That person sells the brand ten times over by showing everyone what a great piece of gear it is.
A four-ring circus on your wrist
Setting up a modern multi-function watch can be a bit daunting, because the watch is a three four-ring circus on your wrist. It does so much in such a small package that each set-up process can take several steps, with various buttons controlling different operations. There’s little room for error. Once you push a button (or buttons) or twirl the stem, the various hands start moving. Take a wrong turn, and it may be tough to find your way back.
High tech can mean low brand
Creating a high-tech device that customers can’t readily figure out is a critical brand problem. It’s never a “customer service” problem. As I’ve noted before, a brand is company potential X customer potential. If customers can’t make immediate, full use of your product, reaping the benefits from your innovation, it’s your brand that pays the price. And ultimately, so does your bottom line.
Product instructions are brand instructions
Just as good design is fundamental to brand success, so are good product instructions. Product instructions are brand instructions. They factor the customer into the brand—and they advance the customer where the brand wants to go. In this process, they help create the customer platform that drives the brand forward. If they fail the customer, the brand fails the customer, and ultimately, the brand fails the company.
Transforming product value into brand value
Getting a high-powered piece of gear to work the way it should is a brand issue. That’s why a significant part of the brand mission is to insure that customers easily transform product value into brand value. As brand value, it’s worth more to customers, and to the company. (IKEA understands this well: a key to selling knockdown furniture is to make it easy to assemble. That’s an essential part of the IKEA brand.)
Brand earth
Yes, instruction manuals are key parts of the brand. They are brand earth, the firmament where the brand nurtures the customer. Their job is to insure that the unique value of the product bears fruit through the customer, given the strategic vision: grow the customer, grow the brand, grow the business.
A real world example
A while back David Weinberger (who’s no stranger to high technology) bought a watch similar to the one pictured above. When he tried to adjust the settings he found the instruction manual to be “incomprehensible.” David has a PhD in philosophy, is a pioneer in Web innovation, and is a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard. If brand instructions fail at his level, the brand has a problem.
Social brand rescue
In an act of social brand rescue, David took the time to deconstruct and re-write the watch-setting instructions, step-by-step, so they made customer sense. He then posted them in his blog.
This is noteworthy in itself, but what’s really amazing is to read the comments to David’s post. Numerous people thanked him for making their watches usable again. They had the same or similar watch and had given up on ever getting it to work right, or they had simply resigned themselves to nutty dates and spurious alarms, all because they couldn’t figure out how to navigate the settings. An innovative watch that should have been a delight had been transformed into a “headache,” or had simply been tossed into a dresser drawer.
For these customers, David’s post resurrected the brand. He’s still getting “thank you’s” more than two years later.
Online videos make watch setting easier
Citizen, the maker of David’s watch (and the watch above), now has online videos showing how to set-up various watches. This is the type of granular, cost-effective and accessible help in which the Web excels. See here for an example. The brand team should be creating these videos when the product is still in development, so that the optimum user interface can be incorporated in the final product design.
For another set of video instructions, see here. YouTube can be a brand builder’s best friend in more ways than one.
Customer time and the brand chain
Making time for your customers also has a positive effect on the integrity of your brand chain. You goal is to manage your brand chain so there are no gaps between where the company/product ends and where the customer begins. (Those gaps exist in the marketing imagination; they don’t exist in the brand imagination.)
Photo: Wahj — Flickr