We all say it. And we say it like everyone knows what we mean. But I’m always surprised at how differently people think about what a brand is and what it takes to “build it”. Some (by no means all) design shops will tell you that your brand is your logo and tagline, so you’d better invest heavily. Some advertising agencies will tell you it’s how much advertising you have in market. A PR firm will say your brand is what influencers say about you. There’s some truth to each of these perspectives. I believe a brand is the relationship a customer has with a company. And like any relationship you have in your life, it’s defined by the sum total of all the experiences and interactions over time. You can’t craft a brand by writing a mission statement and saying, “We are a company that cares about X.” You need to go be a company that is X. It’s not your logo. It’s all that you are. 

Far-reaching definition, to be sure. But think about some of the strong brands you know. For me, Apple is about well-designed technology. And I feel that way because all the Apple products I experience are functional and powerful enough for what I need them for. They’re intuitive to use, show great attention to detail, feel good in my hands, and garner compliments from my design friends. The Apple employees I know are the most creative, talented folks I have worked with in the past. The company’s stores are innovative, high-tech, and the help is both knowledgeable and super cool. Its marketing is simple, creative and (usually) powerful – (I actually think Apple’s brand advertising in recent years is the LEAST creative/innovative thing about the company in some ways). But it’s all of this that makes Apple = well-designed technology, for me. Its chomped-fruit logo has nothing to do with it. 

Ask anyone about the Zappos brand and they will say Zappos = great service. It’s tagline is not, “We’re all about service.” Zappos = great service because of its liberal returns policy, free shipping in both directions, all the detailed information on its site (“these shoes run a little small / large for the size”), and all the great interactions customers have with its service staff. My husband ordered 3 pairs of shoes from Zappos. None fit or they weren’t quite cool enough, so he sent them all back. He then ordered another 3 pairs of shoes. No keepers again. He wanted to order another batch but wondered if he should be feeling bad about sending back yet another set for full credit. He called customer service and asked if it was really OK. Not only did the customer support person say, “YES, absolutely! That’s what we are here for!” But to thank him for being thoughtful about it, she gave him a $20 gift certificate toward a pair of shoes (if he ever found ones that fit). Again, it’s not good luck that Zappos has support people like that. Zappos actually pays customer support people $1,000 to quit, one week into training. If anyone is NOT totally committed – NOT in it for the long-haul – they’d rather know sooner rather than later. 

Brands are earned through consistent actions and interactions, and once built, they are not easy to change. Microsoft has had a tough time putting out the Zune and trying to suddenly be a hip and cool brand. Yes, there is Xbox, but we customers have too many experiences with Microsoft over many years to suddenly believe it’s hip. It’s like one of the un-cool kids on your block who’ve you known your whole life to be un-cool, suddenly showing up at the senior year grad night party in a sa-weet party suit. Maybe in the movies the guy gets the popular girl that night, but not in real life. That guy better show up at the cool coffee shop every day, show up at more cool parties, and STOP being seen playing D&D on the school lawn at lunch if he’s going to really change his brand. 

So brands are, indeed, BUILT. They are built every day, every time your customer interacts with your product or service – the store, the product, the packaging, the receipt. Your brand is defined by the conversations customers have with your people. It’s defined by your pricing decisions, your policy decisions, your hiring decisions and your training programs. It’s the website, the phone tree, and yes, I guess it’s also that logo on your business card.

Two weeks ago, our family went to Disneyland – the first visit for my 5 year-old girl, Fiona, and 3 year-old boy, Rowan. The kids were appropriately dumbfounded. They are still talking about how cool it was to see REAL Tinkerbell fly from the Matterhorm to the castle to start the fireworks show. They are still talking bragging to the checkers at the grocery store that they went on Thunder Mountain Railroad and Splash Mountain. Fiona is still dreamily recalling how wonderful it was to hug and banter with Belle, Ariel, Snow White, Cinderella and others at our “Disney Princess Breakfast” (Of course, poor Rowan thought that we were going to eat Disney Princesses, which explained his terror as we headed out that morning).

But I’m still talking about the trip too. What an amazing “product”.

1. Brilliant vision. Walt Disney had a vision for a family entertainment park that was so extensive and so complete, that even 50 years later, nothing has even come close to it in the world. Like Steve Jobs – or Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr., for that matter – Walt Disney was “all in”. He wasn’t doing a job. He found his “calling” and his work was an unconditional commitment. He worked tirelessly – obsessively – to bring his vision to life.

2. A complete experience. Disney has thought of everything. For example, when you order you tickets in advance, you receive a “welcome packet” for the family to open together around the dinner table. Pins, pictures, magical coins, an array of gleaming, beautifully-designed credit-card-like tickets, each one with a different character on them, plus a hand-written note from the person who prepared the packet for us: “I sprinkled extra fairy dust on this packet so that your trip will be the happiest of all. Jesse”. OK, if you don’t have kids that will sound incredibly corny, but to the rest of you – you know. They make it easy and fun to buy the product (Disney Vacation packages), they build excitement before you even get access to the product, and deliver an experience which is really beyond your family’s wildest dreams.

3. Execution with excruciating attention to detail. When we entered the park on the first day, we used our gleaming, credit-card-like tickets to enter the Main Gate. You scan your ticket under a barcode reader, but instead of hearing “BEEP” or “EH!!!”, we heard “Tinkle tinkle ting!!!” – the sound of Tinkerbell’s magic wand. How cool is that? The next day, we eager ly pushed though the Main Gate for day 2, and when we scanned our tickets this time we heard Jimeney Cricket’s laugh. OK, so Disney called the barcode scanner vendor and said, “I don’t want a beep sound. I want a catalog of sounds that we can upload and cycle through at different times on different days”. How much did that add to the cost of their entry system? Which brings me to…

4. An obsessive focus on product, not profitability. After exploring caves on Tom Sawyer’s island one afternoon, we headed back via raft to the dock at New Orleans Square. As we came off the raft, I noticed a man, dressed in swarthy coats leaning against a fence, playing a penny whistle. He wasn’t talking to anyone or doing much. But his presence – the lonely sound of his instrument and his old tarnished, (Disney) pocketwatch – transformed the place. In fact, Walt even invested in details that very few people ever even noticed. “Hidden Mickeys” are everywhere in Disneyland and their spotters form an elite community of fanatics. . A cost-cutting consultant would show up at Disneyland and have a field day. But they don’t show up at Disneyland, which is the point.

5. Operational excellence. Disneyland hosts 14.7 million guests per year. It is open every day of the year, some nights closing at midnight and opening at 8am. And at 8am, every morning, the place is immaculate. Everything is where it should be. Every piece of trash is picked up (I checked one day – that little ice cream wrapper in the corner of the castle moat was indeed gone at 8am the next morning). No paint is ever faded. And every cast member is “on”. Who cleans the moat at 2am? And when does Tinkerbell practice her zip-line “flight” from Matterhorn to castle? There must be a fake Disneyland / training ground somewhere where she can train? The scale, scope and level of quality is inspiring.

6. A team of people who live the vision every day. “Ahoy sailors! Looks like good weather for our voyage!” We are genuinely, honestly greeted this way by cast member Paul as we weave our way closer to the Finding Nemo Submarine Adventure. He is not tired, but downright jolly – not the way most people look at 3pm on a work day. This is the result of rigorous hiring and training practices as well as creative scheduling and staffing – cast members do only short shifts on any given ride to prevent monotony from setting in.

Obviously, modern Disneyland is the way it is because of the efforts of thousands of people, but Walt Disney started it all and grew a team with a similar quest for perfection. The following quotes from Walt Disney sum up his leadership style and approach to “product development”.

“Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.”

“When we consider a project, we really study it–not just the surface idea, but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.”

“Whenever I go on a ride, I’m always thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.”

“I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.”

“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”

Kids or no kids, I think it’s time to plan a trip to Disneyland…

Yesterday I wrote about how companies should give things away in order to attract customers and build relationships.

Well, I was looking around for good examples, and today I thought of Nike’s training tools. As an example, Nike got a lot of positive attention a while back for the Nike+ program, where a little sensor you put in your shoe tracks how many miles you run. You can sync your runs with a training program that you put together online. Even without buying the sensor or Nike shoes, however, the site lets you design a training program for yourself with the goal of completing a particular event (5k, 10k, marathon, etc.) or just getting in shape. There’s also Nike SPARQ training, a program to help you “be a better athlete” by improving the “five basic elements of your athleticism.”

All of these incorporate social and community elements. Nike+ for example suggests some playful running challenges like “Democrats vs. Republicans,” and Nike+ and SPARQ can both connect you to groups and events in your area.

Most recently, Nike launched something called the “Breakfast Club” to promote its Jordan line. You start with a self-assessment - or an assessment done by any friends you enlist, and then based on that, you create a workout program for yourself.

Here’s a great interview with Emmanuel Brown of Nike Jordan, talking with social media blogger and podcaster, Jennifer Jones.

A few years ago, a friend of mine, Michael, who comes from an upscale family and who was studying the romance literature of Latin America, conducted a unique social experiment. He dressed in simple clothes and set out to panhandle in downtown San Francisco to see how much money he could raise in one day. It took him several hours just to find a free corner that no one kicked him off of (come to find out, most corners in big cities are already “taken” by local panhandlers). But then he began: “Can you spare some change?” People averted their eyes. They looked down. They looked at the sky. They squinted and leaned into their open books as if trying to make out a foreign word. Very few would acknowledge his existence. And because his early actions did not provoke reactions, Michael started to feel like he didn’t exist. He soon found himself lunging toward people, yelling, using profanity. And this was only after about 6 hours on the streets.

I thought of Michael last week when I read BusinessWeek’s article “Consumer Vigilantes”. In it, we hear from some ultra-disgruntled customers who are bashing companies everywhere they can—on existing sites (amazon.com), specially created new sites (comcastmustdie.com) and through more “direct” channels, like 76-year old Mona Shaw who smashed keyboards and phones with a hammer at the Comcast headquarters yelling, “HAVE i GOT your attention NOW?!”

These customers desperately need to be noticed. Their efforts to gain the attention of the companies they seek to connect with have produced no reaction. They’ve tried the phone tree. They’ve tried email. They’ve tried letters to management. They’ve waited patiently (for hours) at headquarters waiting for a manager to appear. All to no avail. And, like Michael during his panhandling experiment, their voices and actions become ever more extreme.

Run away?

In the face of such aggressive consumer vigilante-ism, it’s tempting for us marketers to be afraid—very afraid—and remain safely hidden behind our one-way mirrors. But if we acknowledge that our very own corporate “mass” practices (mass marketing, mass communications, mass-ive cost-cutting) have actually caused much of the anger, then the way forward should feel less scary. We created this problem and we can make it better.

In fact, what struck me in the BusinessWeek article, and in my own life experiences, is how easily people can turn from foe to friend. They rant and kick and scream, “but then someone reached out to me from the company, and now I’m very happy.” Or, “… but then they fixed it, and now my loyalty is very high.”

How could such a small gesture—a simple call or email from a company representative, an inexpensive new part sent out in the mail—result in such a radical about-face? The reason is because it’s SO RARE. It is rare that a customer ever talks to a real person at any of the product companies they give their money to. Think about all the products and you buy and use—your deodorant, your sofa, your cereal, your jacket—how many people have you talked to from these companies?

Go on, engage—it’s OK

It’s time for companies to start talking to customers again, to start building real relationships again, on a mass scale, with help from technology. Customers are out there, on their “corner”, talking away, hoping for some attention, hoping someone will notice. They’re endlessly discussing the products and features they care about, praising and complaining, panning some brands and applauding others (yes, they do this too). It’s OK to jump in to those conversations. Scout Labs conducted a survey (posted out across the blogosphere) and asked the following question:

Do you like it when…you are involved in a conversation with other consumers about a product or service (on a blog or in a forum) and a representative from that company joins in online?

The responses we got:

That’s 70% who say you are welcome, even encouraged, to jump in. But there’s a clear caveat: only real efforts to connect allowed. No spinning.

How to do it well

Marketers are going to have to practice a bit. Many of us are out of touch with real customers in the real world. At some point in our careers we mutated, and now speak marketing-ese, which doesn’t play where we’re going. In this new world, using your real name is essential (gasp!). Typos are just fine (double gasp!). In fact typos get you subliminal brownie points, because it signals to customers that your response was not pre-filtered or canned. Note: those of you who wrote down, “Include a typo” in your notebook page titled, “How to talk to customers”, keep practicing, ‘cause you still don’t quite get it Your customer communication goals should be to educate, explain, connect, ask, listen, and be yourself. If you strive to do these things in your direct communications with customers, you can’t go (far) wrong.

Google does a good job at having conversations. eBay, where I received a crash course in keeping it real, is a pioneer in interacting with its community. Dell’s getting really good. DirecTV does a great job of participating in its influential communities in a very real way, in both official and unofficial capacities. Here’s an older but illuminating exchange between a DirecTV employee and semi-hostile hockey fans complaining about the DirecTV options. In the thread, you see the hardest-core complainers turn into fans, responding to the employee’s openness and candor with statements like, “…thank you so very much for your post clearing up some of the many questions that us hockey fans have. It is great to know that DirecTV cares about us and is trying to improve its Center Ice package.” And of course, myriad startups and small companies are gaining on the big guys thanks to smart products and masterful participation in influential communities online.

You can’t afford not to

Customers just want to be heard. Don’t wait until they work themselves into a frenzy. The line between brand-basher and fanboy may be closer than you think. Look up, make eye contact and jump on in.

I received an email today from a friend at a large, publicly held company, begging for access to Scout Labs. His story was so “typical” that I just had to, with his permission, comment on it. It seems the company in question just launched a version of its web-based software that just didn’t work very well and broke a bunch of things that used to work. A scathing article about the flubbed launch was written on an influential blog in their space. The post was seen by a partner to the company and was forwarded to a channel manager which finally made it to the executive team. The last few days have been hectic for the team — the post has been circulating around the company via email, the marketing team is trying to put a response together, they hastily hired a guy to be responsible for managing a “blog strategy”, and so on. Days later, and the company still hasn’t jumped in to the conversation.

This series of events is all too common. Some lessons that this real-life parable suggests:

• Obviously — don’t launch broken stuff. But even if there is a reason that you need to get something into the market that is not quite baked, be ready for it. Make sure your whole team is ready for it. Be prepared to explain why things are the way they are and what will come next. And ideally, be the first to state the obvious — don’t let customers “reveal” something, as if you had no idea it would be an issue. If there’s a problem, they will find it. Deal with it early. Get your team, tools, processes and policies in place now - don’t wait for a crisis.
• Listen regularly, and be prepared to do something about it. Don’t think about customers as people to deal with after your products are in market. They should be involved every step of the way, on an ongoing basis. Many of the complaints aired in this specific negative blog post were not just related to the recent launch, but were nagging issues that this influential customer had endured for months (years?). He would have liked to have been listened to all along.
• Be part of the conversation when times are good, and things will be easier to manage when times are bad. When you are an engaged part of your own community, customers get to know you. If you do it right, you become a trusted resource and you are seen as a real person trying his best. When things go bad, you will have “social capital” to draw on and get you through.
• Know your influencers and what they are saying about you at all times. Make sure you don’t hear this stuff, after the fact, from a customer or partner. And fighting fires days after the event makes a tough situation even worse.

If you have any additional lessons for my friend at this unnamed big company or to share your own painful experiences and lessons, please jump in and comment.

When we talk about positioning, we often think about competitive matrices and comparison tables. But wait—there’s a way to have even more fun!

A few weeks ago, Information Architects Japan released the 2008 version of their Web Trend Map (still in beta, of course). They’ve taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map. Yeah, a train map! There are not less than 21 lines: from the Technology Line to the Social Networks Line to the Politics Line.

Scout Labs is not yet on the map, but we’ve been thinking about our position on it. Obviously, we have to be on the Technology line, but we’re building something extremely complex. Our use of cutting-edge and advanced technologies such as Natural Language Processing, for instance should put us near the Innovation line. We think the best position for Scout Labs will be around Technorati, Snapshot and MyBlogLog. Nice neighborhood!

You can have a closer look to the Web Trend Map 2008 by downloading it in PDF on their website, and you can even order a printed copy.

The other day an analyst asked me about the different ways companies use Scout Labs-why they start using it, and all the ways they end up using it. It got me thinking about the evolution I see when companies decide to use a service to help them tune in to customers across the Internet. In fact, it reminds me Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In 1943, Abraham Maslow developed his Hierarchy of Needs, a theory to explain human behavior. Maslow suggested that psychological needs are hierarchical, and you can’t move up the pyramid until the underlying psychological needs are met. Many have since challenged his strict hierarchy, pointing out several exceptions to the rule. But as a pop-culture metaphor, it helps describe the various ways companies use Scout Labs.

Here is Scout Labs’ version of the Hierarchy of Needs:

1. Find and fight fires (or CYA)

Many organizations get interested in consumer-generated media ( CGM for short) because they want to find fires – exploding laptops, rants from prominent bloggers, a rumor leak, a copyright violation – and fight them as quickly as possible. This is an absolutely essential use of a service like Scout Labs, and the reason why whatever service you select needs to

• Be real-time (so you can find those fires as they happen).
• Find the fires for you, prioritizing what’s important / worth paying attention to right now.
• Have email alerts built in.
• Help you quickly act mobilize your response.

In this day of highly vocal customers who areconnected to each other real-time and whose seething blog posts about you can show up within the first few results on Google, companies worry about the sheer volume of CGM and their lack of visibility into it. There are huge dollars at stake. Finding and fighting fires is a fundamental reason to Scout the Internet, and one that your organization has to feel comfortable with. This means you need to have confidence not only in the tool you use, but in your team’s judgment and ability to take action in time of threat.

2. Seek out product and marketing feedback

Once an organization gets good at finding and fighting fires, we see them start to listen even more closely to what customers are saying. Rather than only monitoring a few, huge problems and trying to solve them, companies start listening every day for insight they can use to improve products and marketing. What do customers like? What don’t they like? Why don’t they like it? What do people wish we would do differently? Scout Labs makes it easy to answer these questions. When a company evolves to the point where it really listens to customers in this way, we typically see corporate communications /PR, brand managers, product managers, and marketing folks all using Scout Labs together to helpbuild better products, inspired by the voice of the people.

3. Build relationships with customers

Only after a company is a good listener can it jump in and start building relationships with customers. I think of it like a game of jump rope. The customer conversation has its rhythm, pattern and players, and you don’t want to barge right in before getting the lay of the land – you’ll just get all tangled up. (Scout Labs lore: at one point we toyed with the idea of naming the company Double Dutch!) Watch for a while. Learn who the key influencers are. Get a feel for the language, the concerns, the issues. And when you’re ready, jump in. Be part of the conversation. Answer questions, ask questions, inform the best you can.

And if you have a service like Scout Labs that helps you facilitate this engagement – communicate with each other about it. Keep a record of it so that you have organizational memory around it. Track the impact of these customer connections. At that point your organization will be able to build relationships with customers on a mass scale. It’s not easy to evolve to this place. You have to really understand your customers and their communities before you can be welcomed in. AND you have to trust your employees to have these conversations and build these relationships. But if you can get there, the rewards are great.

4. Be a customer-centric organization

The apex for an individual, according to Maslow, is self-actualization –making the most of your abilities and striving to be the best you can be. For an organization that wants to listen to customers, the pinnacle is being a truly customer-centric organization. For a company at this stage of evolution, customers are partners. Listening to customers and engaging with them to build better products and sell more is a strategic priority and part of a company’s culture. Everyone – from the CEO to customer service reps – is tuned in to what customers are talking about, coming up with new, customer-inspired ideas, jumping into conversations to build relationships, and truly innovating.

Being a customer-centric organization is more than a nice-sounding aspiration. We believe it’s a strategic competitive advantage. Whoever listens better, innovates faster, and builds personal relationships with customers wins.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted a few examples of social networks, visualized. One is from University of Michigan (yay) and another is from Nielsen Buzz Metrics. They sure make pretty patterns, but as a marketer, I still can’t figure out what to do with them. Obviously, influence and linking behaviors are important to track (as Scout Labs does), but for me, a list of the most linked-to, or most influential blogs is much more useful. I’d love to have a map of a single post/story/meme and how it spreads over time, but the time-lapse element is the crucial one, there — something that these examples don’t seem to have. But I welcome your thoughts. Besides trying to look impressive, what do these fancy, all encompassing maps of linking behavior in the blogosphere help you do? Take a look Here.

Another nice success story about a company “jumping in” to the peoplesphere, this time to sell ordinary non-magical beans.

Steve Sando is the founder of Rancho Gordo, a boutique farm and purveyor of “Glorious Old Fashion Vegetables and Authentic Instructions for Good Food.” His business began as a humble quest for a good tomato - a quest that I support and admire. American supermarkets sell nothing but horrible, flavorless, rock hard tomatoes ”vine ripened” indoors in European hot houses. They’re plainly labeled “vine ripened” in the same spirit as American companies always brag in their advertising about the one thing they’re worst at.

But I digress.

In the early days of Rancho Gordo, business was slow, and Steve’s friend Scott Kraft convinced him to give blogging a try. As CMO of six apart, Scott is a guy to listen to when it comes to blogging, and he gave Steve some very specific advice:

• Don’t write too much. A paragraph or two per post is sufficient
• Posts don’t need to be profound - just informative
• You must post at least 3x/week
• Always include at least one picture or video in a post
• Include at least 2 external links in any post and inform the people you’re linking to - don’t ask for anything from them, just let them know
• Turn on all of the publicity feeds in your account settings
• Use categories (eventually tags)
• Think about what you want to be known for and write about that often - in Sando’s case: cooking beans
• Turn comments on and answer all of them in the beginning
• Include a blogroll of all your favorites 
• Include a bookroll  of all your favorites
• If you have an existing site, e.g, an estore, link to it
• None of this should take more than a few hours a week

The result? A bountiful harvest. After just two months, Steve’s sales had surged, and the media was calling.