A company cannot have a strong brand if its offering is flawed. It can be profitable - but only in the short-run. The business fundamentals have to be there, and business owners need to have a good understanding of their target customer.
Social Brain's present focus is on buiIding online visibility and reputation with video, but I have been fortunate enough to brand a few successful startups and have worked on building new brands and executing rebrands for dozens of businesses.
I will say that the high rate of success was due in no small part to being picky about which companies to work with. There was always an openness to refining definitions of target, and product, and in the process, defining a more robust brand.
Branding can include logo designs, naming the business, making brand 'hero videos', drafting guidelines on how to use colour across touchpoints, and defining the tone and manner which written comms should adhere to.
Crucially, it implies defining a point of difference to competitors.
All of these things contribute to the make-up of a brand, but the real value of a brand is, in essence, the feeling you get when you have any interaction with or thought about a company. This is what makes Apple more desirable than other computer or smartphone brands, and it's what makes some startups much more likely to acquire users.
The other part of this equation is, of course, the quality of the actual product of service a company provides. Yeah, that.
Enough of the précis, here begins the rant.
Before moving to Australia a couple of years ago, I lived in Japan for 20 years.
Japan tends, for the most part, to be very humble with branding. Not too flashy. Not overpromising. Modest & memorable I would say is how most brands are positioned.
Japan is a great believer in the value of the customer, this includes their satisfaction levels, opinions and feedback. They expect to receive this feedback in person or via word-of-mouth recommendations, and work hard to ensure all interactions generate customer satisfaction.
They also make sure that their goods or services are great and constantly looking to improve.
The result is a huge amount of goodwill for many Japanese brands.
This offers a stark contrast to Australia's attitude to brand building. Especially in some frothy sectors like utilities.
Too often, a 'company' in Australia is no more than a brand logo & website with a tangled web of lease arrangements and outsourced help desks.
The marketplace for, say, internet service providers (ISPs), is swamped with a wall of different brands -all with near identical offerings- creating a paradox of choice.
These brands are marketed using 'price comparison' pay-to-play sites and, if you dig a little, many of them share common ownership. Beyond the name on the logo, they are basically interchangeable.
So you end up with multiple ISP brands being owned by a single large entity. An opaque consumer experience that seems designed purely to prove that 'you get what you pay for'. Hardly a real choice, and a lazy, self-destructive business model.
What happens when there is no product or service actually owned by the company?
The internet networks are leased, there are only skeleton crews of directly employed staff, and all other interactions are via chatbots or outsourced phone help desks.
The outsourced phone help desk interactions are fairly uniform across all the brands and services - usually it will start with an automated message of "your call is valuable to us...typical wait times are longer than usual" and, just before you finally arrive at the human part of the journey, it is prefaced with another automated message along the lines of "hostility towards our help desk operators will not be tolerated".
Any reasonable person has to ask one's self at this point "why would I be hostile? I just want Company X to correct my overbilling/ tell me why my network keeps dropping out. Is this going to be unpleasant?" etc.
The customer has been primed for an unsatisfactory experience.
Usually the people on the phone are very polite. They address concerns and are responsive to questions & detail. I say 'usually' because I have had to spend an awful lot of time talking to these people, changing ISPs 4x in 5 years due to false promises, poor performance, and unannounced price increases.
One recent instance saw a service send me a faulty 5G modem and take 3 weeks to send a functioning replacement modem which revealed their 5G network was (and this is being kind) rubbish. 8 calls, 2 trips to the post office to return hardware, and I didn't even use the service in the end. It cost a lot of unpaid work at both ends. A total Time Burglar.
Every call to a call centre concludes with the operator imploring you to answer a survey on their quality of service. This is one of the ways in which the facade of the company is destroyed.
The survey is, quite transparently, a judgement on the call service, not the ISP company.
The result is that the customer has to spend 30mins on the phone and feels an obligation to be nice to the operator but leaves feeling nothing but negativity for the brand/ company they have been hired to respresent.
Which at this point, I think is fair to describe only as a logo - not a brand, but a symbol that appears on the pdf invoice which yet another outsourced company sends you at the end of each month.
There is no 'brand experience', and no consumer experience worth paying for. Simply a tangled mess of outsourced services stamping a common logo on each part of the journey.
It is the same for every one of the ISPs I have had the misfortune to sign up with.
And sometimes they even forget which logo to stamp on the experience.
Recently, my Brand E ISP redirected me to a Brand Z ISP sign-in page. This was after Brand E sent me a notification that their price would increase 10% at the end of the month and I clicked on a link in the email.
When I pointed this double branding out to the call centre I had called to cancel the service, they sounded very confused. The operator disappeared for 5 mins and came back to explain to me that Brand Z was Brand E's parent company.
This seemed to be all new to them (because obviously they don't actually know anything about these 'companies').
They then explained that the email I received was sent 'in error' and they would not be increasing the price. They very politely apologised.
Another survey followed. I hung up before responding.
Again, this is the kind of ploy that these brands try. They are testing the math of arbitrary price increases. 'If we send notification of a 10% price hike to all of our customers only 4% will push back', type of thinking.
So, alright, they behaved like naughty children and backed down when they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
2 months down the track and I note that the pdfs with the Brand E logo now display the increased price. Despite a 30min interaction, the agreed upon action went unprocessed - lost in a sea of outsourcing.
Rinse and repeat.
This type of operation does not represent a genuine attempt at building companies and they are certainly not genuine attempts at building brands. Brands have value to companies only because they build a loyal customer base. Customers who get great service and have that warm fuzzy feeling each time they glimpse their ISP's logo on an invoice.
This is no more than a web of outsourced services thrown into a blender to extract money with the lowest possible cash and human investment. There is no scrap value to this type of organisation - never mind resale value. There is only a logo and monthly payments.
After the last exchange it occurred to me that in 20 years in Japan I had never had this type of brand experience in any category.
I had one ISP in my last apartment where I lived for 12 years. I signed up and had uninterrupted service at the same price for all 12 years.
When I wanted to disconnect my service, I called and got a human response with zero waiting time. The operator thanked me for my business, did not quiz me on my reasons for disconnecting, and was done in 1min.
I would re-sign with KDDI Japan or recommend them to a friend in a heartbeat.
Seamless. That's how a great company works. The feeling of seamless gratification that a great brand possesses is priceless.
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