Brand?

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.

I really like this series of Liberty Mutual Insurance TV commercials that’s been on the tube for a few years now. Have you seen any of these?

This is the thing that gets me about brand image. Even though it’s gotten much easier to skip TV ads, to relegate them to a smaller portion of your unconscious, there’s still some that slip through and make their mark on you.

Now here’s a little bit on the social context in which these ads are operating: Despite the rise of the Internet and the advent of social media, Americans have become increasingly disconnected from one another. There’s a great quote from an Ani Difranco performance piece back in the 90’s goes something like,

“Why don’t we build a wall between the houses and the highway, and you can go your way and I can go my way.”

However you feel about the sarcasm in this piece (Ani’s East Coast, after all), to me it pretty much describes a common characteristic of what passes for community life in a significant portion of the country.

That’s what makes the Liberty Mutual campaign (created by Hill Holiday, I believe) so heart string-pullingly attractive. It tells me that by being a Liberty Mutual customer, I will be tapping in to my best self and my best community, the one where everyone’s looking out for one other, wanting the best for each other, united in a sort of day-to-day practical love. Ahhhh, so nice. If you’ve ever lived in irascible, don’t-look-at-me old Boston, which is actually where Hill Holiday hails from, then you may understand the depth of yearning for this kind of a daily way to be.

Now to look at the Liberty Mutual campaign in the context of prevalent branding in the insurance industry, think State Farm for a minute. It’s pretty brilliant, the longstanding advertising appeal made by the insurance stalwart. It’s all there in their tagline: “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” So State Farm creates a simile where they’re appealing to that America where everyone knows their neighbors and is looking out for one another. That’s our company. We’re like that one neighbor that was always checking up to make sure you were alright. Not like those other neighbors that didn’t give a crap if a bunch of strange guys were loading furniture OUT of your house.

But in the Liberty Mutual campaign, society itself has been transformed. It’s a way more ambitious approach. There’s no need for an overt appeal to a bygone American era of community. Instead, that vision of community is made real once again in the images of the ad. We see this community in motion, acting out its sense of comity and fairness – and Liberty Mutual is set up as a reflection of that loving community, the embodiment of it. What’s that old activist slogan? “Be the change you want to see in the world?” What is the Liberty Mutual campaign but that transformation of being? Sit back and think on it a minute. It’s pretty powerful stuff. I mean, they must be one heck of an insurance company, right?

And that’s the thing about really well executed brand image work. It’s powerful, evocative, and gets you where you live.

LOOK UNDER THE HOOD: BRAND IMAGE VERSUS BRAND EXPERIENCE

Here’s the rub of this little advertising utopia of heartfelt messaging. No amount of beautifully constructed brand images can ultimately determine a customer’s loyalty without a brand experience that matches what the image evokes. And woe to those who emphasize image at the expense of experience…or, for that matter, experience at the expense of image.
So I decided to fight back the warm and fuzzies and take advantage of a tool that most consumers out there have access to. Yeah, you know, like I’m talking about the Internet. I hit up a site that’s been around for a while and is generally respected, FreeAdvice.com – complete with surveys, comments, etc.

Here’s a little of what I found on Liberty Mutual’s actual brand experience, or at least a small swath of that experience. For the point I’m trying to make, it’s telling:

http://insurance.freeadvice.com/reviews/6/survey/Liberty+Mutual+Insurance/

Take some time to read some of the comments, which are instructive. The positive ones were few and far between. This one is pretty representative:

“Liberty Mutual finally gave me what was agreed upon in my policy only after a protracted series of phone calls and letters. Their handling of my claim demonstrated their interest in only their bottom line. One employee actually said something like, “I’m sorry we did so poorly in handling this claim. We can’t do anything to make up for the situation. We hope you will continue to insure with us.” He really said that.” (from August 07)

You can also tell a lot just by looking at the survey results. Seems that, according to this survey, the longer a customer was with Liberty Mutual, the less likely they were to be satisfied. When you consider that once you become the customer of a particular insurance company, it probably takes a few years until you actually file a claim, well then those rose-tinted extra special one-of-a-kind 3-D glasses start to slip down the bridge of your nose — exposing something a little more callous than that glorious community from the compelling LM TV campaign.

If you did a little research after every great ad campaign you saw, what would you discover? And would your discovery change your idea of what it might like to be a customer of the company doing the advertising?

Among other things, this blog will be about looking at and questioning brand images, the meanings and resonances they produce, and the realities they may mask. It’s called skepticism (what ought to be the default setting of anyone reaching into their pocket and plunking down dollars on En-eeee-thing).

So stay tuned, dear readers and feel free to highlight brands you’d like to lionize or rant about.