Stop The Negativity

There's no question about it. The unpredictable rise in energy costs is having a dramatic impact on every industry and every individual. For both service providers and customers, it is causing frustration, tight budgets, lost jobs, and escalating pricing. But most of all, in my opinion, it is affecting how employees and customers are reacting to the circumstances and treating one another. Companies must address this and reverse this negativity to preserve goodwill and create loyalty.

Companies need help reversing this negativity to preserve goodwill and create loyalty. Employee marketing programs and behavior need to be closely coupled with external consumer marketing programs. It's long past time to retrain employees how to treat customers. Whatever happened to "the customer is always right" and "say it with a smile"?

Airlines: the best (or worst!) example

The airline industry is probably the best example of this negativity, causing havoc among the consuming public, shareholders, and airline employees.

Like many of you I am a frequent domestic and international traveler. We have all witnessed angered customers and ticket agents coming close to throwing punches, impatient gate agents curtly corralling customers like cattle (no eye contact, no thank you, no have a nice flight), baggage claim managers who laugh at customers with lost luggage woes. Perhaps most startling of all, we overhear flight attendants, right in front of customers, badmouthing their own employers for a lack of appreciation. Employees wear strike buttons and tell customers that the airlines don't know what they are doing.

And airlines don't make it easy on their employees. JetBlue's recent announcement that the airline will charge passengers $7 for a pillow-and-blanket kit, even though it comes with a $5 coupon to any item from retailer Bed, Bath & Beyond, will be a tough sell for flight attendants.

"Replacing our old, recycled pillows and blankets with this state-of-the-art, high-quality take home kit is an eco-conscious, health-conscious and customer-conscious decision," is how Brett Muney, general manager of product development for JetBlue, spun it. "We are constantly seeking ways to enhance the in-flight experience for our customers, and providing them the option to purchase the world's cleanest travel pillow and a fleece blanket at an affordable price delivers on that promise."

State of the art? Customer- and eco-conscious? World's cleanest? Does JetBlue really think we're falling for this self-serving line? It's painfully obvious the airline figured that charging for pillows and blankets would add incremental revenue to the flight, plus reap a bonus by blending the charge with a promotional coupon through a sponsor. Flight attendants will have a tough sell ahead of them, and the negative effect of trying to sell this program to passengers affects the attendants' ability to be positive brand ambassadors. I bet the whole idea will be abandoned when JetBlue gets an all-too-predictable backlash from its customers.

Are your customers, employees, and shareholders facing a similar situation?

Confidence is broken in the airline business on all sides. There is an urgent need to instill employee engagement and reverse this unfortunate situation. Many will ask, how can you afford to do this in an era of cost cutting and unexpected oil-price increases? My question, however, is this: How can you not address this urgent situation and make your people brand advocates and emissaries for what you need to achieve? Companies who recognize that employees are the face to the brand and manage effective internal communication and advocacy provide an incremental 19.5% shareholder value, according to a recent Watson Wyatt study.

Inward Strategic Consulting is a leader in successful change management and behavioral communications. We help companies transform their employees into customer advocates and change their behavior to support brand values. The experiential methods we have designed are creative, and they work.

If you and your team would like to learn how to achieve internal and employee branding that changes behavior and wins over your own people, please contact us. Put a stop to the doom and gloom by recognizing that your people are the face of your brand, and that their behavior needs realignment.

A Tribute to Michael Hammer 1948-2008

The business world lost one of its best and brightest business gurus this past week. Dr. Michael Hammer unfortunately passed away at an early age as a result of a devastating brain bleed. He was a visionary who shaped the reengineering revolution in the late 90s with his book "Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution". He was a counselor and mentor to many of the most successful CEOs and helped countless corporations improve performance and efficiency while attaining the highest levels of quality and throughput. He trained armies of thousands of people through his public workshops and training programs with a focus on process redesign and organization transformation. His ideas and processes touched many.

On a personal level, Michael was a dear and close friend of mine as well as professional mentor. Ten years ago at a Labor Day BBQ at my home, he encouraged me to establish our firm and create a proprietary approach to engage and enroll employees around change, effective communication and process redesign. He said at the time, "That unless companies motivate and inspire employees to accept change, the company will never be successful at obtaining buy-in and accelerated performance." Indeed, in a 1996 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he admitted that he and other reengineering proponents hadn't paid enough attention to people. "I wasn't smart enough about that," Dr. Hammer said, "I was reflecting my engineering background and was insufficiently appreciative of the human dimension. I've learned that it's critical." After the millennium, he often talked about the importance of employee buy-in and acceptance of change suggesting focusing on the advocates of change and the eradication/elimination of the opponents of change.

He was the brightest person I have ever met with a wide variety of interests and curiosities. He enjoyed antiquities, ancient maps, modern architecture and design, global exploration to his far off places and Jewish biblical scholarship and study. He was a pillar within our close community and a very generous yet private philanthropist. Most of all he was a loving husband, father and a good friend. I will miss him dearly.

-Allan

Forrester Research Confirms Value of Customer Advocates

Recently, Forrester Research embarked on a groundbreaking research project on transforming employees into brand advocates. As part of its due diligence, several company executives, academics, and industry thought leaders were interviewed. I was fortunate enough to be included and spent an hour with researchers over the phone. The results of the report are further proof and acknowledgment, through major case studies, that companies can successfully use employees as their brand advocates.

Forrester interviewed a number of experts besides me from consulting firms and academia as well as marketing executives from organizations representing telecommunications, hospitality, airlines and healthcare. The report said that "Marketers spend significant dollars to promote their brands. However, if employees aren't aligned with and rallied around that brand, then delivery of the brand promise is broken, leading to suboptimal customer experiences, missed opportunities for brand differentiation, and even customer defection. A first step in building internal brand advocacy is the assessment of the current level of brand engagement of employees. To help this assessment process, Forrester provides a framework to segment employees into four groups based on their level of brand advocacy: brand resisters, brand learners, brand believers, and brand advocates." ("Stimulate Employee Brand Advocacy", Forrester Research, Inc., April 2008).

Through its Leadership Board programs Forrester's clients leverage a combination of proprietary research, analyst expertise and the collective wisdom and experience of their executive peer group. Turning Employees into Brand Advocates is just one example of the ways in which senior marketers have benefited from their participation in these communities. To learn more about Forrester, the Leadership Boards and view some of our research briefs, please visit http://www.forrester.com/Leadershipboards/CMOGroup.

How Inward Can Help

The independent report from Forrester Research hit our sweet spot - at Inward, we are pioneers in creating successful programs that inspire employee brand advocacy and enable it to thrive and prosper. We'd welcome the opportunity to chat with you about your current issues and advance your plans for putting a proper employee brand advocate program in place. Let us share with you our internal-brand credentials presentation, and Change FX - our Employee Engagement Measurement tool, with a demonstration including several case histories and best practices.

If you would like to see either of these presentations created by Inward, please let us know and we can arrange an on-line demonstration for you and your staff.

Enjoy the rest of the Summer!

-Allan