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For Service Brands It's All About the People
The most creative logo in the world won't make up for a crabby front desk employee, a dirty office, or sloppy service. Developing and maintaining a strong brand for a service organization is significantly more challenging than developing and maintaining a strong brand for a product. Why? Because a service is less tangible, more ephemeral--and often involves multiple "touchpoints" that really determine the "brand experience."
What makes a strong brand?
Recognizability. Performance. Consistency.
When we're talking about a product--a carbonated beverage, for example--recognizability can come through a logo and design, performance comes through the taste of the beverage, consistency is an element of the manufacturing process. But, when we're talking about a service, the process of brand management becomes much more complex.
Recognizability. While recognizability is impacted by logos and design elements, there are other factors to consider. If you practice out of an office or a clinic, your physical location and how it looks, how it's furnished, etc., will impact your recognizability and your brand.
Performance. How is a health care organization's performance defined? By the physician? The registration clerk? The distance from the parking lot to the front door? The cleanliness of the facility? The magazines in the waiting room? The delivery of care (and how do we, as non-clinical consumers, measure that?)? Yes--all of these things, and more! Performance is a multi-faceted process with multiple touchpoints and multiple opportunities to either strengthen or weaken the brand.
And, finally, consistency. The greatest challenge of all. The challenge for service marketers in managing a brand involves managing human inputs and human actions. Developing standards and processes, communicating those standards and processes, ensuring consistency in such things as, for example, as how the phone is answered, "uniforms," service standards, hand-offs between departments, how employees talk about each other, etc.
Too often as we focus on other important elements of the brand--like the logo, the name, the "company colors," the design templates, etc., etc., in the service arena we have a tendency to forget about what is most important about the brand--the people.
Recommended Reading:
The New Strategic Brand Management
Advanced Brand Management
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