While branding and marketing are more the fields of Scott Bedbury (A New Brand World) and George Murphy of Modo-Group, in the book Rethink I do have an entire chapter about business value and one of the three pieces of the definition of business value has to do with brand and identity to test which aspects of your organization are why customers, partners, and even employees like do do business with you (the other two relate to key performance indicators and the value of improving the performance of something).
Something I don’t talk about in Rethink is something that I will call “brand illusion” where companies build their brand based on something REALLY misleading, and they succeed mostly because the customer just doesn’t know any better. It’s a very risky thing to do, but it often works well. The case of payroll giant ADP is especially clever but I am going to work my way up to that one.
Folgers -“It’s mountain grown”
Schlitz – “Our bottles are washed with live steam”
Lucky Strikes cigarettes – “It’s toasted”
Microsoft Windows 7 – “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea”
What these ads did is take something that everyone does in their industry and make it sound like they are unique in doing it. All coffee is mountain grown, live steam is a standard process in bottling, all tobacco is toasted, and customer feedback drives almost all products in almost all industries. Yet these ads were very successful (the Microsoft ad launched Monday, but feedback has already been positive). Creating the illusion that something generic is something special. Brand illusion.
In the other direction, there are companies that deceive customers with a message that clouds what is really happening.
Progressive insurance told customers that if you go out to their web site, they will not only give you a price quote for their own insurance products, they would also quote the prices of other insurers in case they had better rates for you the customer. Isn’t that incredibly nice of Progressive! Not so fast. Progressive was actually being extremely devious. Insurance is all about risk management, and when Progressive sees a customer that has a high risk profile, they send them away by offering a “better” rate from a different insurer. The illusion of helping you when they are really selecting the customers they want. Risky, but very clever.
Payroll giant ADP is my favorite though. ADP manages over 50% of American payrolls, and for years the message has been that they don’t really make money from their payroll services, they claimed their profits came from the “float” the time between receiving funds from an employer and the time they pay them out. The fact is that with current technology and regulations, the notion of float is all but nonexistent. So why would ADP say this? Because they are really expensive and they actually make a lot of money from their base services. The illusion was to lead the customer to think they were getting a bargain and that ADP was generating the profits in some other way. Very clever.
So circling back to rethinking, the notion of how you message your value to your customers is key. These are just a few examples of companies that have successfully manipulated customer perception through a variety of different illusions. Food for thought in how you connect with your customers.
-Ric
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