Okay—experience is how a candidate or prospective client validates whether or not your branding message is accurate, whether you actually do and say what you claim to do and say.
Now for the the bad news: it’s entirely possible to brand yourself in a negative fashion. Even worse, you can market yourself in one way and brand yourself in another. This leads to a corrosion of credibility that is difficult to reverse.
Let’s say, for instance, that you love pie. Really, who doesn’t love pie? You visit a restaurant that claims to have the “the best apple pie in the state.” That’s a rather aggressive branding statement, isn’t it (especially if there aren’t any prominently displayed awards to back it up)?
So you order a generous slice of this pie, and to your dismay, the apples taste sour, the crust is hard, and to top it all off, the service is terrible. Are you going to walk out of the restaurant thinking to yourself, “Wow, that was the best apple pie in the state.”? No, you’re going to walk out thinking, “I am never, ever going to eat pie at that restaurant again.” To recap:
The branding message (before the customer’s experience)—“We have the best apple pie in the state.”
The branding message (during and after the customer’s experience)—“We have the worst apple pie in the history of all mankind.”
Here’s something else that’s important to remember: that negative branding message was amplified in the mind of the customer because the marketing message that preceded it promised exactly the opposite of what they experienced. It would have been better for the restaurant if it had not attempted to brand itself at all, or at the very least, not branded itself as having “the best apple pie in the state.”
That’s because you, the customer, had an “experience expectation,” one to which you were committed to holding the restaurant. After all, you plunked down $5 to see if the experience matched the expectation. When the two didn’t match . . . well, that was bad news for the restaurant (and for any company that uses a branding message to set up an expectation that’s not matched by the experience of its customers).
It is crucial for a company or firm’s customers or prospects to have a branding experience that’s consistent with its message. If you promise things to customers, clients, and candidates that you can’t deliver, then you’re driving them to your competition, and that’s not an exaggeration. That’s because not only will your customers or prospects believe you deliver an inferior service, but they’ll also believe—accurately or not—that you’re misleading at best and dishonest at worst.
That’s a double-whammy dose of negativity that can drain your firm’s energy, not to mention its profits.
In my next blog post, I’ll address the issue of who, when everything is said and done, is actually doing the branding.
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