Invisible Brand

Can communications ever take the lead?

Everybody knows that the worst thing a service business can do is to over-promise and under-deliver. But there is always a temptation to speculate that a little bit of extra promise might just create the ‘pull effect’ on brand delivery that is so hard to achieve through any amount of staff workshops, however well-intentioned.

Perhaps the most famous case history here has to be Avis’s ‘We try harder’ campaign. Hertz was the US car rental market leader, Avis only #2. This left Avis with ‘no option but to try harder’ than their rival to build their business. It is, of course, easy to overlook the fact that Avis was already doing a lot of the ‘trying harder’ stuff internally before its (ultimately) famous campaign broke. But what is indisputable is that Doyle Dane Bernbach’s campaign galvanised staff culture and commitment in a manner that no amount of internal brand development work could have done.

Importantly too, customers loved the spirit of the promise and were prepared to believe it - after all, it is not a complicated or unbelievable promise.

So staff found themselves dealing with welldisposed customers who would say things like: ‘I just love your attitude compared with those guys at Hertz.’

In the circumstances, what else could they do, but try harder for such nice, supportive customers.

The risks of getting it wrong are, of course, immense and the case histories are legion. ‘We’re Getting There’ must have provoked a depressingly frequent ‘No You’re Not’ response from passengers to the poor employees of British Rail.

And Midland Bank’s ‘The Listening Bank’ campaign wasn’t remotely helpful, motivating or even amusing for managers who - however much they might personally have listened - had no power to prevent the impact of heavyhanded corporate policies on their clients.

Because the risks are so significant, does this mean this is not a game worth playing? Before deciding, consider what is probably the best example of all - of a campaign that profoundly influenced brand delivery - Commercial Union’s ‘We Won’t Make a Drama out of a Crisis’.

The enormous success of this campaign rested on two important factors (three if you include Susie Henry’s skilful word-smithery). The first was that the claim focused on what research demonstrated to be the most visceral edge of the relationship between insurers and the insured - the claim process (where most customers expected cynical treatment from insurance companies as a matter of course). The second was, crucially, that CU staff could individually and collectively do something to deliver against the promise. They could be sympathetic and courteous in their dealings with customers; they could treat the policy small-print justly, not as an excuse to avoid payments; and they could feel good in the process.

Like Avis, CU had already worked hard on the good brand practice that under-pinned its proposition. But it was the articulation of this promise through a major advertising campaign with an original and compelling strapline that brought the concept to life internally and externally, with resounding success.

It is interesting to note how rarely the word ‘we’ crops up in the strap-lines of service business campaigns. Yet ‘we’ must figure daily in the brand development work that all good businesses in the service sector undertake. Perhaps it is time the brand development gurus and the communications gurus worked more closely together. A relevant, deliverable and empathetic consumer promise, endorsed by the team and promoted widely, might be just the trick to meet both internal and external communications objectives.