Brand Awareness is a Paper Wall

April 24th, 2007

Anybody can gain brand awareness. It’s easy. Ever hear about streaking - the short-lived fad in the 70’s? That was someone’s 15-minute brand awareness, or longer if jail time was involved.

Brand awareness is like a paper wall. You can’t see through to the other side - until you break through it. Then you realize “Whoa, I’m here and everyone’s looking at me. Now what do I do?”

Seth Godin’s post about the brand formula describes brand as “..the product of two things: [Prediction of what to expect] times [emotional power of that expectation].

His advice is to “..keep awareness close to zero among the people you’re not ready for yet, and build the most predictable, emotional experience you can among those that care about you.”

For service contractors that means first revealing your business bedrock, your customer-experience promise.

Then creating tools that employees use to keep that promise.

There’s always pressure to raise brand awareness. However, this thinking doesn’t include the follow-on question of “Why should I (customer) care about you (contractor)?”

It’s more important and difficult to know who you are, what you stand for, and why customers should care about you. That’s why this work is rarely done.

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Chris Arlen
President, Service Performance

Technorati: brand awareness, customer experience, service contracts

Entry Filed under: Marketing