Many businesses feel their brand is under attack because they changed the experiences they deliver because of COVID-19. The pandemic still has the world in its grip, but it becomes looser as vaccinations become more widespread. We see signs of increased hiring and manufacturing output in some developed countries. Increasing manufacturing output means more demand for field service for installation, training, warranty work, and remedial repairs on equipment supporting the manufacturing ramp-up.
The big unknown is how B2B customers will react to field service, continuing its emphasis on touchless service while thinking about the old normal. The answer to that question may impact how these customers think about our brand and possibly put the brand under attack.
How B2B buyers select a product to purchase
As a service leader, you know about customers and their buying habits. You know that most products are becoming commodities. While there may be differences between products from different managers, those differences will disappear over time, and new differences will emerge from other competitors. You also know there is usually a minor price difference; B2B businesses do not buy based on price.
So how do people choose whom to purchase their new equipment if not by price or features and functions? If we were sincere, we would say the primary differentiator is service. Of course, our sales and marketing peers would disagree with you, but we know they are biased. They would probably agree if you said, “People buy based on the brand.”
What is a brand?
If you ever want to get into a good argument with sales and marketing people, ask each person to write their brand definition. Do not be surprised if there is no agreement. During my research, I discovered an excellent article, “Defining What a Brand Is: Why Is It So Hard? In the article, the author, Tracy Lloyd, shared a few definitions:
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The “Father of Advertising,” David Ogilvy, defined the brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.”
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The Dictionary of Brand establishes a brand as “a person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organization.”
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Marty Neumeier, author and speaker on all things brand defines brand by first laying out what a brand is not: “A brand is not a logo. A brand is not an identity. A brand is not a product.” Neumeier says that “a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.”
Definitions 2 and 3 are remarkably similar yet complex to do anything with.
In late 2012, my friend Harry Klein, a professional Marketeer, and I decided to collaborate on a White Paper called “Because I’m The Customer!” A Guide to Managing Your Brand & Customer Experience in the Age of the Customer. Here is a paragraph from the White Paper:
As Brian Millar wrote in his FastCompany article, Branding Talk Isn’t Helping Your Company. Here’s What Should Replace It:
“If you promise something clearly, deliver on that promise, and repeat the process, you build strong emotional links to your company with certain consumers. But that’s where the value resides: in my head and your head, and your mother’s head. And the stuff inside my head is my property. If brands exist at all, they exist in the minds of consumers. I can switch my brand of search engine at a moment’s notice. Bank accounts and automobile make are a bit more hassle to discard, but I can still change my mind about them.”
So, a brand is unique to each of us. It is the sum of all promises and experiences with a product, service, or Company. This perception changes as we forget old or irrelevant promises or understandings and add newer ones to our memory. And to make matters worse, we might have different perceptions of situations with the same product or service. Here is an example:
Think about your current car. If we talk about design and ease of use, you might say, “It took me only 30 minutes to figure out how to set up the infotainment system.” But if I ask you about the dealer’s training on all the new features, you might say, “he was confused, and so was I.” And if you ask about fuel economy, you might say, “It is great on the open road, crap in city driving, and does not come close to what was on the sticker.” But if I ask, “How do you like your new car?” you might respond, “I love it, and I feel like I rule the road when I drive it.”
Are brands real?
Even though brands only exist in our minds, they are real because we make our purchasing decisions based on our perceptions of the manufacturer’s promises and our experiences about how well they are met. In other words, brands drive how money is spent! That is as real as it gets, especially if the brand is under attack.
In January 2021, McKinsey & Company released an interesting article, “The Rising Value of Industrial Brands.” One of the six main insights in the report is;
Visibility drives performance—but only for a few players. The top three brands in each segment average 60 percent of visibility, and the leading brand typically has four times more visibility than the third-place competitor. Overall, 5 percent of companies capture 95 percent of total visibility. And top-quartile companies enjoy about 30 percent higher ROIC than those in the bottom quartile.
McKinsey & Company uses visibility (share of voice) to measure brand favoritism. They define visibility as “… brand name mentions in the media, including industry publications that customers read to learn about new products, systems, and technologies. Because B2B sales are increasingly held to the same standards as B2C sales channels, including the option to purchase online, we also tracked the growth of searches for the brands on major online search engines.”
Next, they show how the share of voice impacts the Company’s ROIC (Return on invested capital):
Closing the circle
Since a brand is the sum of all promises (expectations) and experiences with a product, service, or Company, and brand visibility drives ROIC (and other financial metrics), your pledges and delivered experiences drive your financial results. That raises two questions:
Question 1. Where do expectations come from?
There are six sources of customer expectations.
- Organizational promises
- Competitor’s promises and performance
- Personnel promises
- B2C experiences
- Previous experiences with your business
- Comments from friends and associates
Unfortunately, you and your business can only influence #1 and #3. The other four are outside your control, but you must be sensitive to them. If you or your team discover that customers have expectations that differ from what you can routinely deliver, you must reset their expectations. Doing that professionally will prevent disappointment when the experiences are as you promised, not what they wanted.
Question 2. Where do experiences come from?
Every interaction your Company has with a customer or prospect creates a new memory of an experience. The two most important steps you can take to make sure you are providing great experiences are
- Train everyone on how what they do and say impacts how customers feel about doing business with your Company.
- Follow up either all interactions or a randomly chosen subset of all interactions and talk about how the customers feel about their experience. Do this daily with the same people making the calls and analyzing the data using as many views as possible. Then, the results will be shared with everyone in the company. Discussions are better than surveys because people are sicker of surveys than being locked down at home.
Why is monitoring brand performance critical as we exit COVID-19?
We have all been busy implementing touchless service and a blended workforce for the past year. We are trying to avoid sending our field engineers on calls for health, safety, and economic reasons. Many believe that these initiatives will continue and become our permanent business model.
This was expected during the height of the pandemic, and customers subconsciously adjusted their expectations to accept what you were providing. But what if customers’ expectations revert to the 2019 business model and you continue to deliver on the 2020 model? A significant gap will open up, and customers will feel disappointed if they start talking negatively about your service. It will hurt future businesses and make everyone feel like the brand is under attack.
The solution is marketing communications. You and your team must proactively reset your customer’s expectations to align with your intended future deliveries. There might be intense customer discussions, and you may have to modify your plans if the pushback is too significant. You must ensure that your business’s experiences meet or exceed customer expectations.
Finally, don’t automatically jump on the cost-reduction train when the C-suite starts looking for more revenue and profits. Make sure your promises are being met and exceeded by your performance. It takes work, but it is worth the effort.
On April 20, 2021, this article was published in Field Service News and was titled “
If you are new to brands, customer value creation, and customer experience, contact Sam and start the discussion.
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting helps our B2B product manufacturing clients grow their services revenue and profitability by applying the methodologies and techniques associated with Customer Value Creation and Customer Experience professions to assist its clients in designing and commercializing new services and the associated business transformations. Contact Sam here.
Photo credit: Image by David Mark from Pixabay