The 23 year-old water, part 2
Some people who have listened to my yarping about brand issues for awhile eventually feel they have to challenge me: “You’re talking about operations, org dev, HR – you’re not talking about brand at all.”
True or false? Well, both. It just seems that when I dissect a case where a brand has gone wrong, I find that the underlying factors frequently lie well outside the purview of whoever in an organization is formally charged with branding activities. And when I see a brand that’s hitting on all cylinders, it doesn’t take long to understand how the nominal face of the branding activities are best understood as expressions of deeper organizational commitments to doing all kinds of other things right.
The upshot is that I tend to use the term “brand” in a lot broader context than some of my colleagues do. So, back to my days as a waiter and bartender…
Lesson 2: Failing brands usually make their workers feel meaningless.
Savvy organizations not only think about the system that delivers the brand, they structure so as to promote seamless teamwork and commitment. In the restaurant I worked in back in the early ‘80s, for instance, there might be a guy back in the kitchen with the ability to cost me $20 on a table. If his compensation is the same regardless of whether he helps me or hoses me, then we have a significant brand risk-point. From the perspective of the waiter taking the hit to the wallet, it’s a personal problem. From the standpoint of management, the issue isn’t that Sam got a bad tip, it’s that the structure of the organization resulted in a negative hit to the brand – that bad tip results from a customer who’s unhappy with something, and that customer will be telling friends.
A big part of the problem in that organization was related to how employees felt about their importance to the company. People in the trenches of the service industry don’t get paid all that well to start with, and the less they make the less they care, on average. Tip-sharing policies addressed some of these issues in the front of the house, but kitchen staff were provided with no mechanisms, financial or otherwise, that would allow them to participate in the perceived successes of the company.
These conditions hamstrung the restaurant’s ability to truly delight its customers at every turn. Uninvested back-of-house workers undercut the efficiency of waiters, for instance, and unless their actions were egregious, there weren’t likely to be significant consequences. Frustrated wait staff, inexperienced in negotiating their way through organizational minefields, often reacted in ways that only confirmed the us vs. them dynamic.
In the end, a disproportionate amount of the management team’s time and energy was consumed not by fine-tuning an exceptional customer experience with the brand, but by managing internal conflict. In operational terms, success was less about excellence and more about keeping the wheels from flying completely off.
There were productive options available to management, but in the final analysis their corporate philosophy saw their employees – front and back of house – as expendable and replaceable. (Never mind the conversation we can have about the cost implications of penny-wise and pound-foolish acceptance of turnover – we’ll address that one another day.) Employees knew they were irrelevant, that they weren’t valued, that no matter what they did they wouldn’t be missed. Their compensation communicated the message. Management’s refusal to take legitimate concerns seriously reinforced it. And seeing 90+ percent turnover rates tolerated as a natural course of business hammered the message home for even the best of employees: we entrust 99+ percent of our brand contact to people who do not matter to us.
A lot of number of companies today have similar employee relations policies, and none of them will admit it. When I encounter a business whose customers aren’t happy with their relationship to the brand, though, my first reaction is to examine the company’s view of its employees.
Did I mention that this once-booming restaurant chain went out of business a few years back?
:xpost:
lullaby pit 
Interesting reading.
I work on the administrative side of the branding practice (a sub-practice of the larger ‘Sales and marketing practice’) of a consulting firm, and it’s amazing the amount of blank looks and “well, what does that mean?” questions I get when I tell somebody what my job is. (With a degree that blended journalism, advertising, and marketing, I’m usually pretty interested in watching the studies that come down the pipeline.)
Branding is tough to define but at the same time it’s one of the current gold rings of marketing, and most companies – as you pointed out above – seem to think about it more from the customer point of view than the employee point of view, which is a loss – because if you can’t sell your employees on wanting to make your brand better, all the marketing in the world won’t help.
There’s a restaurant group here in Chicago that has some 25-30 restaurants under their umbrella, and they pay their workers a decent, liveable wage – back and front of house. Their restaurants are popular, each with its own distinctive image, and the staff always seems to enjoy being there – a departure from most of the restaurants I was familiar working with. I’ve got some friends who work for the group, and from the way they talk about work, if I ever had to go back to waitstaff work for any reason, I’d choose there – that’s a restaurant group that’s got it right.
Interesting reading.
I work on the administrative side of the branding practice (a sub-practice of the larger ‘Sales and marketing practice’) of a consulting firm, and it’s amazing the amount of blank looks and “well, what does that mean?” questions I get when I tell somebody what my job is. (With a degree that blended journalism, advertising, and marketing, I’m usually pretty interested in watching the studies that come down the pipeline.)
Branding is tough to define but at the same time it’s one of the current gold rings of marketing, and most companies – as you pointed out above – seem to think about it more from the customer point of view than the employee point of view, which is a loss – because if you can’t sell your employees on wanting to make your brand better, all the marketing in the world won’t help.
There’s a restaurant group here in Chicago that has some 25-30 restaurants under their umbrella, and they pay their workers a decent, liveable wage – back and front of house. Their restaurants are popular, each with its own distinctive image, and the staff always seems to enjoy being there – a departure from most of the restaurants I was familiar working with. I’ve got some friends who work for the group, and from the way they talk about work, if I ever had to go back to waitstaff work for any reason, I’d choose there – that’s a restaurant group that’s got it right.
Would you mind telling me who this unusually enlightened restuarant group is?
Would you mind telling me who this unusually enlightened restuarant group is?
The Lettuce Entertain You (leye.com) group. Friend of mine who works there reports they pay their dishwashers $16/hr, for example.
The Lettuce Entertain You (leye.com) group. Friend of mine who works there reports they pay their dishwashers $16/hr, for example.
Thanks. I have to file this away for future study.
Thanks. I have to file this away for future study.