Marketing service brands: the toughest branding challenge today?

intangibility makes marketing service brands especially difficult

When it comes to building and maintaining a strong and distinctive brand in any category, the marketing terrain has never been more challenging. Arguably, the challenge is even more daunting for service brands. In part this reflects the power of today’s better-connected, highly empowered consumer to use digital word of mouth to spread the news about a bad experience with a service business, in an instant.

But the steeper climb for service brands also results from a unique and interesting set of characteristics and challenges that they share:

• Intangibility – relative to products that we can hold, use, and consume, people find it far more challenging to attach meaning to an intangible service offering, such as a checking account, an internet connection or life insurance. This makes defining a relevant and graspable brand promise all the more difficult, yet all the more essential. The goal for most service marketers: make sure the brand promise can be expressed in terms – verbally and visually – that make the service feel real – if not tangible. Sun Trust is a good example of a financial services company that has tackled this challenge by demonstrating what life on “solid financial ground” looks and feels like throughout their marketing communications initiatives.
• Commoditization – sustainable points of difference based on unique benefits are especially rare in service categories. With today’s technological advances, competitors can copy a service offering in just weeks.  Meaningful points of difference that do exist tend to perish quickly, which reinforces parity perceptions in most service categories. One consideration to combat this commoditization: use relevance itself as a differentiator. Service brands that are hyper-vigilant about doing the things – big and small – that keep their services relevant to their best customers, often manage to rise above the commodity label. American Express has been steadfast in its commitment to understanding what’s most relevant to its card members at any given time, and then delivering on it with laser like focus.
• Complexity – to battle the commodity problem, service brands often seek to differentiate themselves by adding complexity and nuance to their core offering. Yet often times the added layers result in a service offering that goes beyond the consumer’s personal expertise and comprehension and they simply cannot see or appreciate the added value. Services marketers must put themselves in their target’s shoes when constructing multi-level or multi-dimensional offerings to avoid running the risk of over-engineering the service and under-delivering on ROI.
• Inconsistency – a service brand is by definition an “experience-based” brand which illuminates what may be the key challenge:  there is almost no way to replicate the exact same experience each time for each customer. A detailed description of the desired brand experience at each touch point is a must, but still it can’t eliminate human inconsistency. An added defense is to ensure that you have an extraordinarily consistent brand story leading up to and coming out of the experience. Hotels such as Four Seasons and the W often have been envied for their ability to “script” the desired brand experience — then stick to the script flawlessly.
• Real-Time – thousands of times a day service brands face moments of truth – real time consumer interactions that are opportunities to strengthen the brand by exceeding expectations or weaken it by under-delivering. Which is why service brands must look at their brand-building resources and efforts through the lens of “real-time brand-building” moments. To be true brand ambassadors, front line employees must be able to not only articulate the brand promise, but be able to translate it to the “brand-right behavior” in their day-to-day, moment-to-moment customer interactions.

Each of these challenges weighs a bit differently on any given brand. Conducting a thorough assessment to clearly define and understand which of these challenges most impacts your brand and business is at least half the battle. It will make the task of building actionable strategies all the more manageable and set the table for a more successful outcome.