Archives / September 2005

While speaking at a "branding summit" recently at a major tech company in Silicon Valley, I heard several different definitions of "branding". Depending on the speaker's background, a company's brand could be explained from a number of angles:

- It's an aesthetic style that consumers should recognize. (The visual approach)

- It's a consistent message that must be pushed out to consumers as frequently as possible. (The big-advertising approach)

- It's a story that we tell ourselves and each other. (The narrative approach)

- It's a reasonable amount of value that consumers should be willing to pay a reasonable amount for. (The classic marketer's approach)

- It's a culture.

- It's a promise.

- It's the iPod.

- It's whatever we can do to be like Nike/Starbucks/Coke.

While I think that each of those statements is accurate to some degree, the reality is different for every company. After all, different companies have different customers, services, and business goals! Not every company sells a famous logo printed on a container of sugar water; thus, not every company should try to be Coke. Every company should try to find its own path in crafting a brand.

But if I had to give one definition to apply in all cases, it would be something like this:

The brand is what you tell your friends about afterwards.

Think about it. When you have a great (or bad) experience with a restaurant/airline/hospital/website, what do you tell your friends about? Do you echo the messaging from their advertising? Do you say, "Hey, try them, because they had the coolest logo"?

Of course not: you tell your friends what was important to you - the details about your particular experience. And that's the brand. Nothing more, and nothing less, than the sum total of all the customer experiences served up by that company.

Here's an example. As I sat on the plane last week from New York to San Francisco, I heard the traveler in the seat behind me telling his row-mate, who he had just met, why he loves JetBlue. More legroom, lower fares, on-time departures, DirecTV - all the things that he has valued in his personal experiences with JetBlue. This was the most accurate description of the brand he could give, and the most effective that his row-mate could hear - better than a dozen TV commercials. JetBlue couldn't control what the guy said, but they could - and did - control the experiences he had as a customer. And thus the brand got built.

(I should also note that this exchange took place in the back of an American Airlines plane. Why did JetBlue come up in the first place? Both travelers noted when they sat down that American doesn't provide very much legroom in coach. So a less-than-ideal customer experience in one context created the opportunity for another company to extend its brand.)

With this in mind, let's simplify that definition:

The brand is the customer experience.

And that's all it is. It's not primarily a story, or a logo, or a style, or even a value proposition. Primarily the brand is just what customers tell each other about: their experience.

So if you want to create a good brand, the best - perhaps the only - investment to make is in the customer experience. This means learning from customers through direct observation, and crafting a strategy built from that customer input.

I'm not suggesting the death of advertising; nor am I suggesting that companies avoid mission/vision statements or logos or color palettes. However, I am suggesting that all of those things are secondary. The primary job of any brand executive is to create an outstanding customer experience.

Once the customer experience is set, the other elements - aesthetic style, consistent messaging, value proposition, iPod-ness, Coke-ality, all of those wonderful ideas will take care of themselves. I promise.

"Google has made home pages virtually irrelevant."

So said one of our moderators at our recent LabFest in New York, where we observed dozens of customers using dozens of websites.

The moderator, admittedly being a bit provocative, had observed several respondents entering websites through Google search results, rather than by typing the URL into the browser and entering "properly" through the home page. Often the search results link pointed to a destination page in the middle of the website, which caused the customer to miss the home page altogether.

To be fair, we also observed customers in labs entering the home
page of the website - but even then, many began by searching Google
for the name of the company they wanted to visit.

Stated another way: many users, when not directed how to start, begin their sessions by going to Google and searching for what they want. (A small minority use Yahoo, and almost no one uses any other search engine.) Some companies, depending on their size and popularity, also have a fair percentage of users who do type the Web address directly into the browser.

The key, though, is how to find out: by not directing users how to start the session. In our non-directed listening labs, we ask customers to use the Internet in the way they normally use it at home or work. While we do have a goal for the research, we try to let the customers lead us to the answer, rather than the other way around.

Non-directed research is a foreign concept for some practitioners. On the issue of Google usage, for example, many companies never learn how users naturally begin their site visits, because the usability tester begins each session by directing the user to start at the company home page (or whatever specific page they want to test).

I've always thought this to be a strange way of observing customer behavior - by commanding the customer to act in a certain way! Not just how to enter the site, but what action to take next; what tasks to accomplish; what features to look at; what questions to answer.

Now, directed research is valuable in some tactical circumstances, such as the testing of a specific feature in an online application. But I see that as an exception to the rule: letting customers lead, in a non-directed environment, elicits much more accurate and insightful feedback.

Customer experience is mainly about understanding, and serving, the key unmet needs of the customer. This is a strategic issue that's poorly addressed with a tactical research method. You simply can't find out the customers' priorities if you give them a list of pre-written tasks; there are too many assumptions built in. Instead, why not just ask them to show their experience?

If these ideas are intriguing, a good way to try them out is to see how customers enter your site - naturally. In your next user test, don't force customers to start on a specific page - ask them to show how they get to your site.

P.S. For what it's worth, a quote from one of the LabFest attendees, having observed non-directed research for the first time: "[Our company] saw things in one afternoon that we did not see in a year of task-based usability sessions."