A recent experience with a company’s new product was complete disorienting.
Truly, if the experience was a book, I would have been glancing at the cover more than once and turning back pages, chapters even, to figure out how I had the story so wrong.I‘ll keep it generic to protect the guilty
There are some products I buy from a company on a regular basis. I like them a lot! I’m loyal.
As a good customer, they offered me an opportunity to take an assessment. The result was a fairly definitive label with another opportunity to talk to one of their coaches. Sure! Let’s find out what this label they gave me means. What caused it and is it fixable? Do they have a product for it or do I need to search for something now?
Label? What label? The coach never mentioned it. The coach asked me again some of the questions I answered in the assessment. She had access ti the assessment right? Wouldn’t you hand off the data to the next person who was actually going to talk to you about it? One would think!
I asked about the label. She didn’t know anything about it. Instead, she offered me a solution to my problem no longer known as the definitive label, but a problem nonetheless, with a $2,000 annual coaching program to deal with it and train me to maintain my newfound knowledge.
Say what?
No thank you.
I told her about the products that I bought and liked and were nowhere near $2,000 in a year’s time. She knew nothing about the products and gave me a sort of glossed over, “That’s nice, dear” response as she told me why I need the coaching program.
No thank you.
“Okay,” she said, “would you like to take part in a free ten-day challenge? A coach will check-in with you every day to help you deal with this whatever-it-is-you-have.” All labels abandoned.
Sure. I will see what you have to give me for free. Will the free coach know the label, I wondered.
Daily Check-in
New coach. No mention of the label.
Whatever they were going with from the assessment got edited evidently, like marketing budget cuts. Buh-bye labels! Buh-bye branding!
And now the branding began to backtrack.
The daily coach was pleasant and had some good ideas for me, however, more than one of her suggestions completely contradicted what the founder of the company espouses. He’s not shy about his rules I have heard them on social media, in podcasts, in the literature that comes with the products. But somehow, this coach, who should be preprinting his brand, doesn’t know these rules, the dictums, the nonnegotiables.
Hmm.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. Also a major breakdown in the branding.
Clearly this company contracted out the coaching and didn’t embrace and train the contracted employees as brand ambassadors.
Oops!
How to Avoid This Nonsense
Don’t make any assumptions. If you are bringing in outside help of any kind, you need to make sure they are telling your story as well as any in-house employee is. Leaving things to chance can greatly harm your reputation.
In this situation, the brand was abandoned, and kicked around a bit. The branding is not just the packaging–it goes all the way through the package, the product, and in every detail of service starting with how it is presented, then delivered, and closed out. Your standard operating procedures should follow the branding as much as your logo colors.
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