Is your brand a liberating experience for your customers?

The original Latin for liberate is "liberatus" which means to "set free"; this is what a good brand will make you feel when you think of a brand that you have worked with. It is important to remember that your brand is not what you ‘tell' your customer about who you are and what you stand for but rather what your customer's ‘perception' is of who you are and what you stand for. This can be quite daunting because every aspect of our behaviour and communications has an impact of how your customer forms that ‘perception'.

A very important equation to remember is; Perception = Reality.

There is an old saying, "If you have the reputation for getting up early, you can stay in bed all day!" This is great but what happens when it is the other way round; where we have a bad reputation that we deserve or even worse, a bad reputation that we don't deserve? The cost of this is immeasurable and often significant to your company.

How often have you done business or tried to do business with an organisation who have left you feeling bad, awkward, frustrated or disappointed causing you to feel unable to express your opinion? How have you reacted? Some of our reactions can be:

"That is the last time we will use them!"
"I will need to keep a close eye on them..."
"What an attitude!"
"We will move to someone else when we get someone better."
"We only do business with them because we have no choice..."
"You can't trust them but the problem is they are all the same."
"If we were in their sector we would clean up!"
"They don't know what they are talking about."
"They just don't care..."
and on it goes.

All of these reactions are due to an ‘experience' that our customers have had, be it directly or indirectly by a friend or colleague. We will all experience this in one way or another and it is useful to look at this area further to see why this happens and see whether we demonstrate any of these negative values in your brand and if so, what can we do about it.

The first point is to clearly develop a ‘client centric' ethos/charter and publish it to all your clients, staff and suppliers then hold yourself accountable to it. This achieves several things:

1) This makes a clear customer focused set of values.
2) It gives us a benchmark to work from.
3) It is measurable.
4) It makes a strong statement.

The second point is to train the client centric ethos throughout the ‘whole' organisation explaining the reasons and potential impact living it company wide can have. Not just the management or the sales team but everybody so that it becomes part of your culture.

Thirdly we need to measure this, then develop and improve on the areas that we could do better, demonstrating that we are a listening and improving business that cares about our customers.

If we are genuine about doing this then we will liberate our clients to want to give us feedback on how we can improve because they respect us and like us. You will in return see your business develop strong loyal relationships, consistent constructive feedback leading to continuous improvement and an exciting brand that your customers feel real ownership of and loyalty to.

Make sure your brand is a "Liberating experience" to all who encounter it!