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.

Women's High Service Demands

To fuel the female-centric creative that we’re developing for our clients, Mullen’s Frank About Women took a current pulse on how women are feeling about customer service and service brands. We fielded a national consumer study covering a wide spectrum of service-based categories, and our findings reinforce just how tenuous the relationship is between women and service brands today.

In this economic climate, women know they wield scarce buying power — and they’re not afraid to use that leverage. It’s more challenging than ever to foster loyalty, especially when women have so many choices.

The Male/Female Dynamic:

We asked both men and women about their service product expectations in 29 different categories from telecommunications to travel and health providers to financial services. Not surprisingly, we found that women continue to be far more likely than men to expect good service — sometimes beating men’s expectations by a 15+ point margin.

Interesting too, is that women are far more likely than men to say that there are major differences in service quality between companies. For example, 59% of women say there are major differences between different hotel chains, as compared to 47% of men; 41% of women recognize major differences between credit card companies versus 32% of men. The same gap exists in categories like pharmacies, phone services and many others. Service marketers take note — women notice everything.

Another important difference between the sexes: As the Chief Purchasing Officer of most households, the majority of women immediately took bold steps when the economic crisis hit and edited out nonessential services — while men were more likely to wait it out, saying they were considering cutting back their use of services. Even scarier to marketers is that the women in our study indicated they are considering cutting back even more.

Which Categories Have Women Seeing Red?

So who’s got them really steamed? Credit card companies, medical insurance/HMOs, airlines and cable providers share the dubious honor of making women downright angry (not a feeling anyone wants associated with their brand).

You know what they say, “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” But what about a few thousand or a few million women scorned? Women not only have spend-power, they wield friend-power. One snarky Facebook status or testy Tweet in response to a disappointing service experience can reach thousands of women and men and then what? Today, an apology may not be enough. The possible silver lining — women’s expectations for good service are so low in certain categories that there is plenty of opportunity to wow women … if you try a new approach.

Another Frank About Women finding:

• Women expect the highest level of service from hotels, insurance companies, pharmacies, hospitals, banks, utilities, ISPs and grocery stores.

Smart service marketers should be asking themselves these questions:

• How can we defy expectations and set new standards for service in our category?
• What strategies are we employing to ensure our consumers know they’re valued in this economy?
• What are we doing to solicit consumer feedback and use it to affect our business in real time?
• Are we actively following the social chatter about our service?
• What are we doing to become a part of that conversation?

Even if your target isn’t solely women – what could you learn from looking at women’s attitudes and behaviors to make your brand’s service experience better for men and women? Listening closely to female consumers can help a company or brand design an experience that appeals to all.

• What’s your plan for branding from the inside out? Are your employees steeped in the brand? They better be, because the strongest service brands today are built on an employee base that can consistently articulate the brand’s promise and values.  If that’s not the case, ask how your company can do a more effective job of engaging, activating and instilling pride in your employees.  By developing a unique online photo mosaic of employees that recognized their contributions and connected their work values to the brand’s core values,  CSC made huge strides in galvanizing it’s global workforce.

• Have you moved from a marketing in isolation to a multi-functional marketing mentality? When your best customers’ “enterprise-wide experience” is so central to business success, it’s all the more critical to realize that the entire company – across all functions – is on the marketing team. Have you taken down the internal walls and invited your HR and IT folks onto your brand management team?

• Have you scripted the desired brand experience at all points of contact? It’s one thing for employees to be able to articulate the brand promise it’s another thing for them to bring it to life consistently. Your brand “lives” (or not) with each customer at each touch point, everyday. Scripting the experience is key to brand consistency and can help transform a negative service experience into positive long-term outcome.

• Are you effectively pre-selling the desired brand experience? Given the inherent inconsistencies of delivering the desired experience, are you appropriately managing customer expectations as to what the experience can and should be? Are those same expectations being used to motivate your employees? Managing both sides of the expectations and experience equation is key to narrowing the gap between the perception and reality of your brand experience.

• Are you listening to and appropriately participating in your brand’s online conversation? The exploding social marketing landscape enables your customers (past, present and future) to have an influential voice on what your brand is or isn’t and whether your brand can be trusted or not to live up to its promises. Leveraging new communication channels to both listen to and engage in a proactive brand-building dialog is no longer optional. And the real-time earning, restoring and protecting of “brand trust” is increasingly essential for on-going service marketing success. Say what you want about Starbucks
  

  Are you actively participating in online conversations about your brand?

  challenges of the past two years, they have done a tremendous job of listening to and appropriately participating in the online discussions about their brand.

Now more than ever, service brands and businesses are being confronted by heightened customer expectations and frustrations, new customer empowering technologies, fragile customer loyalties and unexpected competitive offerings. Asking the right questions now just might be the difference between future success versus failure.

Embarq: 1 of 3

Challenge: Begin with deteriorating economic realities, add telecom price wars and a redefined consumer target (families with kids under 18) and you’ve got the conditions for a smart new messaging platform – one that acknowledges the changing times and target audience.

Solution: Leverage the reasons that families are spending more time at home together—changing lifestyles, life stages and new economic pressures—and demonstrate how EMBARQ fits in.

From morning to night, communication providers play an active role in nearly every activity in the household: Checking the weather online or on TV. Helping kids research a history project. Connecting with family and friends. Planning travel. Watching movies together. So we created a campaign around our new messaging platform, “It’s a big world out there. EMBARQ brings it home,” positioning EMBARQ as the provider who brings the world into your home through the Internet, phone and television. Through engaging imagery, we showed consumers that planning a trip to Easter Island and researching naval history for their child’s project were only a web page away, and family movie night was right in their living room.

We’re thrilled that the “Bring it Home” campaign generated over 1.6 million calls from January–June ’09, while core service (Phone/Internet/DISH) direct mail within the campaign generated 25% close rates for Q1 ’09.

Embarq: 3 of 3

CSX: How Tomorrow Moves - 1 of 4

Challenge: Increase awareness and improve opinions of transportation giant CSX.

Solution: Show that CSX is a responsible way to ship the products we love and need.

CSX is one of the biggest transportation companies in the U.S., but few people know exactly what they do or how important they are to our day-to-day lives. Not to mention, a lot of what people think they know about rail freight is wrong. Trains are actually a safe and environmentally responsible way to transport goods. They keep traffic off our highways and can move a ton of freight 436 miles on a single gallon of fuel. As it turns out, once we made people aware of these facts, opinions of CSX improved dramatically. This led to our new brand positioning and strategy: CSX moves the critical ingredients of everyday life in ways that make a difference today and tomorrow. In plain English, that means we all get the stuff we want without wrecking the planet. Check out CSX.com for the whole story.

CSX: How Tomorrow Moves - 2 of 4

CSX: How Tomorrow Moves - 3 of 4

CSX: How Tomorrow Moves - 4 of 4

SunTrust: Live Solid. Bank Solid. - 1 of 3

Challenge: Establish SunTrust as a trusted partner in this day and age when no one trusts financial institutions.

Solution: Stand for something that consumers can genuinely believe in.

Live solid. After the meltdown, that’s what people everywhere were looking for. A way to be solid, live solid, do business with a bank that was solid. SunTrust couldn’t simply claim it, even though they were one of the few banks to emerge unscathed from the economic crisis. Instead, by celebrating people who chose to and believed in living solid – staying out of excessive debt, living within their means, knowing their priorities, focusing on family and loved ones – SunTrust had a platform from which to talk about its own products and services. Products and services that were compatible with people who wanted to “live solid.” The campaign touches on every aspect of people’s lives — television, print, in-branch, collateral, radio, online advertising, microsites and a corporate website – suntrust.com.

SunTrust: Live Solid. Bank Solid. - 2 of 3

SunTrust: Live Solid. Bank Solid. - 3 of 3

Challenge: Refresh La Quinta’s brand positioning to differentiate it from a sea of look-alike competitors.

Solution: By being an antidote to negativity and stress, La Quinta can build an emotional bond with travelers.

Let’s face it: Travel has become pretty stressful these days. Especially for business travelers, who shuffle around the country praying for upgrades and an extra bag of airline pretzels. But there are moments of joy for even the most relentless road warriors, and we knew if we could find them we could forge a connection with these travel-weary souls. We thought the power of optimism could elevate and transform perceptions of La Quinta and help the brand stand out against the competition. So we positioned the hotel chain as the “bright spot” at the end of the traveler’s tunnel.  Softer beds. Brighter colors. Bigger rooms. Comfort and relaxation at the end of a long day. Maybe it’s all the positive thinking, but people seem to be responding. With a 20% increase in brand awareness and traffic to lq.com up by double digits, there’s a lot to be optimistic about.

LaQuinta:Wake Up on the Bright Side - 1 of 4

LaQuinta:Wake Up on the Bright Side - 2 of 4

LaQuinta:Wake Up on the Bright Side - 3 of 4

LaQuinta:Wake Up on the Bright Side - 4 of 4