The Jordan Philips Marketing Blog - Internal Branding - Employee Engagement

Is lonely America looking to brands as friends?

I think that America is getting more and more lonely. As this happens, people as consumers are being starved for experiences. This starvation is making people seek out brands as friends. Kevin Roberts may even go as far to say people are looking for an intimate relationship with brands they love. Guess what, he is right.

Mark Driscoll writes in The Radical Reformission:

• Playing cards as a social activity is down 25%.
• The number of full-service restaurants is down 25%, but fast-food outlets have increased by 100%, as more people eat alone and in cars.
• Family dinners are down 33%.
• Having friends over for dinner is down 45%.
• The amount of time spent caring for a pet is up 15%.
• The amount of time spent on personal grooming is up 7%.
• From 1980 to 1993, participation in America’s #1 participant sport, bowling, was up 10%, but the number of bowling leagues decreased 40%, as more people bowled alone.

Driscoll adds, “Isn’t it odd that we are apparently becoming a nation of attractive people who sit at home alone at night with our pets, watching TV shows about relationships and taking medication for the depression brought on by our loneliness? Meanwhile, our neighbors, whom we do not know, are spending their evenings in much the same way.”

So here is my question. In what ways do you think your brand is filling this void in your customer's lives? If you could somehow tap into this, how would you approach it and what do you think the end result would look like?

A special thanks to Tom Ellsworth from Sherwood Oaks for providing me with his notes on this.   

Evaluating the Branded Team

In the past couple of weeks I have ran across this philosophy in team building at least a couple of times. Most recently I came across it in a speech by Randy Pausch (definitely worth watching), a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, which BTW is absolutely amazing. One of the other times I came across it was watching a Franklin Covey leadership series where they documented the leadership secrets of the UNC's women's soccer team, which is probably the most winning of any sports team (ever).

As a Brandcentric leader and consultant, I am always concerned with building the brand from within. This means wining the war for talent, ensuring that employees are engaged and actively delivering on the brand promise. Having your internal team engaged and on-brand is critical for success.

So, here is the theory. On a set of at least 15 data points (in order to be truly scientific), you measure individual performance and then post the results publicly where other team members can view them. This does a couple of things. Nobody wants to see their name at the bottom of the list for starters. If you want to talk about the ultimate motivator, trust me...there is nothing like this. It also lets everyone on the team know who the superstars are. They are the example of what everyone should strive to be. Those superstars also have to keep up their game to stay there and this means continually raising the bar.

In the words of Jack Welch, "One of the most cruel things you can do as a leader is to not let bad performers know they stink". The other thing you do is try to get them up to speed with everyone else, if they don't share your values and can't meet the numbers then you simply get rid of them.

One quick side note: there was a recent study (I will find it), that took the top performers and isolated them in a team; away from the average and the poor performers. Do you know what happened? Their performance skyrocketed. Just some more food for thought. 

Finding 15 data points to track and measure should be easy. I would suggest using a peer evaluation system and then combining it with hard-line data. I think its important to match up values and numbers. Its also important to mention that you need to choose these carefully and do so in a way that they are directly tied into your companies KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

In one instance for a Credit Union client of mine, we used secret-shoppers as part of these data points and measured various parts of the teller transactions and shared these with the team. We were able to take individual scores from a low of 19 in some cases to an overall average in the 90's. Thats massive.

If the bulk of the scores comes from peer evaluation you will also create a sustaining culture of improvement. As a marketer, I would also say that you would be creating a culture that competes within itself to deliver the brand promise. Think for a second about what that means to the customer experience.

This philosophy also lets you identify the top performers, mediocre performers and those who are falling behind. Once you have that handy bit of information there is all kinds of useful things you can do with it. Like most everything, however, if you don't track and measure performance, you simply can't improve it. Are you measuring brand delivery performance in your company? In this market, if you aren't, thats a serious mistake. Developing the team and improving the customer experience is in short...everything.

Take a look at the following chart and tell me how you would approach this team if these were the monthly evaluation scores for brand delivery.

This is just a simple example, but once you have data like this you can do all kinds of things like track data points on an annual basis, on an individual basis for specific areas (remember you will have at least 15 to pick from), etc. You can also use it to identify top performers and use that in your hiring decisions...think of it as a building a superstar template.