in associationwith
marketing
‘That’s really quite a strategic failure
and the trust damage to the [Sony] brand is massive. And the whole handling of it was terrible – almost BP-esque!’
various operational silos. Not many companies map jour- neys and have a benchmark, a customer journey.”
Getting social The social media revolution has intensified the need to understand the customer experience and to really con- nect the promise of the marketing message with what’s actually delivered, says Desbarats. “Customer grumbles are now sort of like anti-advertising. You try to manage brands but ultimately a brand is what exists in the mind of consumers. “In the past, the positive ‘this is what we want our brand
to be’message has been powerfully driven by the control of advertising. The internet kind of makes these asymmetri- cal communications more symmetrical. All of a sudden, you may think you’re wonderful but if enough people on the internet think you’re bad because you’ve let them down operationally then your brand has a big problem.” A classic example in recent times has been the hacking
of Sony’s online PlayStation accounts. “You sort of won- der to what degree they really understood culturally at the highest level the new kind of interactive relationship that they had with their customers,” explains Desbarats. “That’s really quite a strategic failure and the trust damage to the brand is massive. And the whole handling of it was terrible – almost BP-esque!” That the number of touch points through which
brands are now judged has exploded is another key fac- tor. “Those touch points all need to communicate a co- ordinated message. That’s always been good in terms of brand strategy but marcoms needs to move beyond just communication. You communicate to influence behav- iour but one of the main communication channels is actually the service or product interaction itself. “One of the games we play with marketing managers
is to get them to talk about their product as if it was a television channel. In other words how many people see it?What kind of messages do they get through it? If you were judging the look of your product compared to your brand, is it there?What’s it like to take your product out of the box? You may make noise about carbon offsets and doing all kinds of green things but is your packaging full of cellophane and does your product burn bright and consume lots of energy? So there’s all kinds of levels at which you’ve got to tackle it.” In stressing how fundamentally important customer-
led innovation now is to businesses, Desbarats refer- ences Ford’s introduction of mass production at the beginning of the 20th century. “I think experience-led innovation and operations is as important to corporate philosophy as mass production was because, in the mod- ern age, when information can flow anywhere and tech- nical leads can be eroded in an instant, the bond of trust is all that’s left to deliver value.”
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visitwww.sage.ie Summer 2011 Irish Director 49
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