In Part One we covered the need for total business transparency in order to create a brand customers could trust. In Part Two we'll cover how to create the rest of the brand personality.
As stated in Part One, the goal of the brand is now to create, essentially, a person (not a company) that people interact with.
The first part of this is nothing new. You decide the overall attitude your company has when putting out advertisements, when creating your slogan, and when you answer your phone calls. In this step you're taking care of how you interact with customers on a more general, sweeping scale. You're taking care of the messages most people receive when dealing with your company when one-on-one interaction isn't happening.
The second part is more personal, and deals with situations where a customer normally doesn't feel like they're interacting with a human being. It deals with those moments where they feel like they're getting an automated, bland, "corporate" response. The solution is to avoid those responses. It's a lot of work, but in every situation where a customer contacts you, personalize it. And when I say personalize I don't mean swap out a name and put a jpg of your signature on it. I mean write the response from scratch every time. The fact is people are constantly getting very personal reactions from many people around them online. That makes it all the more jarring when they get a response that is clearly automated. Because of all the companies that are using automated responses, it's as refreshing as when you call a tech support line and get a person who knows what they're talking about instead of a machine that asks you to press numbers to solve a problem. It will make the customer's experience with you significantly more memorable.
The third part focuses on the attitude all those personal interactions take on. While you want them to be personal, they also need to be consistent. It's similar to when you're emailing or speaking with a friend. When giving them any kind of information there's a certain expectation for how they're going to respond and anything else catches you off guard. You want the responses to have a consistent tone to them. This links back to the first part of this article, because it's assumed that all the large scale messages customers receive have a specific attitude and tone too. If your brand image is casual, make all your personal interactions casual. If it's strict and business professional, avoid contractions and colloquialisms. If your advertisements use humor, let that shine through in your interactions as well.
The fourth and most important part of the new brand is community interaction, especially if you're a startup. I'm not just talking about using social media either, I'm talking about having meetings with professionals from your industry just to talk about how things are going for one another. I'm talking about making contacts, making friends, and overall letting people (not just prospective customers!) know you exist. Some of the biggest brands out there do well not necessarily because they're the best, highest quality product but because everyone knows who they are. Again, it's important to keep that same cultivated brand image in mind when you're interacting with the community because you become a physical representation of all things your brand is supposed to be.
The bottom line of this brand evolution is that you're creating a consistent entity your customers see and deal with 100% of the time they're interacting with your company. On top of creating that image, the best thing to do is make sure people see it. The time has long passed, let's change the branding landscape.
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