So, picking up on my last post about Liberty Mutual and what I’ve been thinking of as their “Good Samaritan” campaign: It’s a pretty brand-invigorating set of communications, but the perennial skeptic in me has been wondering (pretty much since the branding boom of the 90s), what really is the purpose of a brand’s image, it’s promise, if the brand experience totally contradicts that promise?

Is it:

A. Simple bad faith – do many businesses believe that as long as a brand’s appeal gets customers in the door, their experience afterwards is irrelevant, that the customer is now a captive audience?
B. Laziness – is the business simply not interested in making sure the customer’s experience is a fulfillment of what the brand implicitly promises? Does it just take too much damn energy?
C. Structural issues – is the business simply not set up to integrate its brand work with its marketing with its products with its customer service?

I would love for those of you who have experience with some of these issues to weigh in here. What have you see that leads you to certain conclusions about why a company’s brand image may be wildly different from the actual experience of using its products or services?

For my own part, I tend to lean towards the captive audience theory. I think businesses have become accustomed over the last few decades to thinking that the customer is essentially passive and powerless. But anyone who’s been looking at what’s going on over the last few years is aware that consumers ain’t that passive anymore.

Now many marketing/advertising professionals and media folks might point to social media and the vast amounts of personal reviews that are available on the Internet (not to mention the straight-up data) as reasons for customers’ increasing boisterousness. But, honestly, I think there’s more to it than that. I mean, we’ve now had at least 60 years as an unapologetically consumer society. And while that might lead you to reflect on how passive we’ve become in the U.S. – less prone to vote, exercise, etc. – it also helps to think about how, after 60 years being constructed as consumers, many people may have actually gotten pretty good at it.

It seems to me that the Internet and social media are simply providing quick and easy ways for customers to mouth off and exchange information that they didn’t previously have at their disposal. If the Internet had appeared in the late 70s, I wonder if we wouldn’t have seen the same kind of two-way conversation phenomena develop – because people were already becoming savvy about the difference between a brand’s promise and its delivery on that promise. (we could easily expand our discussion to politics here, re: Watergate)

Jackie Ferrier, a filmmaker who blogs about marketing strategy, approached this line of thinking to a degree a few months ago:

“Brands have to work harder and more creatively to make sure their message gets heard in the cluttered market place.

As a result, we have become increasingly immune to and suspicious of brand messages. The
way we learn about products is becoming more and more dependent on word of mouth. We are
more likely to take the word of a complete stranger, simply because their views appear to be
more authentic.”

I would step back a bit from her opening statement here to a broader view. It’s not the
proliferation of brand messages that make us skeptical, as she implies – it’s the length of our
experience as consumers that has built up our ability to mistrust and deconstruct the messages
directed at us. We consumers have, in effect, consumed branding and advertising. We know
more instinctively to dig a bit deeper when it comes to making buying decisions (and the
recession makes these decisions even more consequential).

At the end of the famous John Ford western film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, a
reporter says something to the effect of “when it comes to a choice between printing the legend or the truth, you print the legend.” But in the old West, the reader of that legend didn’t have a million ways to debunk what they just read.

For today’s businesses, printing the legend of their brand can be downright perilous without a
corresponding focus on the truth of the customer’s experience.