“It’s the people behind the brand who make the brand,” says Diana Shaheen of Procter & Gamble (I worked on the Tide detergent account, packaging and early online, in the mid-90s). “The employer must define what (the) business needs from employees to deliver the brand promise to customers … if your internal and external branding messages aren’t aligned, the front line will not deliver on the promises.” Her quote is from “Brand from the Inside: Eight Essentials to Emotionally Connect Your Employees to Your Business,” which I reference frequently. Even the title is a useful distillation of a viewpoint I share. If employees do not at the base level believe in what the company (through them) does, success can remain elusive.

Still, they have to be “empowered” to act on their motivations to deliver upon the company’s mission – ultimately, to make decisions, embrace their responsibilities, achieve results and go from “good to great,” as best-selling author Jim Collins puts it. So it is important that managers effectively articulate and live by the company’s mission to lead by example in empowering employees. And while I’m quoting some highly-accomplished peers, Yamashita and Spataro, authors of “Unstuck,” insist that “everyone must be a keeper of the vision – responsible for delivering on your purpose. Meet. Talk. Publish your vision for everyone to read. Create symbol and stories within your company culture that remind people of what you’re doing – and why. Don’t leave out a single person.” Amen.

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Holistic marketing approaches recognize that ‘everything matters’. In my business, we view everything from a business card, to a website, to a product on a shelf, to a ten-minute troubleshooting session with a service representative, and even a friendly “hello” from the front door greeter at Wal-Mart as an important touch point in the delivery of a company’s service promise.

When a services business is not delivered via a machine or a screen, the human element is of critical importance. From a customer’s perspective, their encounter with service staff is arguably the most important aspect of the service delivery. That said, in my view the key factors favoring a strategy of employee empowerment are:

1. When there is any interaction between an employee and a customer
2. When the employee’s job/role/responsibility involves decision-making that can in turn shape the service delivery
3. Where synergies can be gained when a team of employees can be more productive and motivated to perform the service at or above the desired levels of quality.

More to come….

Posted by: Colin Mangham

Flashback. Beginning June 16 last year, more than 130 treasures from the tomb of the famous boy King Tut and other Valley of the Kings tombs and additional ancient sites [were] on display at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for five months. According to The Art Newspaper, by early September, 600,000 tickets had sold, and total attendance was projected to approach one million, placing the exhibition second in overall attendance only to the 1.2 million attracted by the 1979 show.

LACMA did an excellent job of addressing all five of the strategies above by managing reservations and crowds through the support of its partners: AEG finances the show, AEI manages production and some of the logistics of the tour, and National Geographic produces related books and films. LACMA members were able to be first in the queue to choose not only the date they would like to attend, but also the time. The latter is not typically an option and, in fact, it was a stringent requirement to address number 3 above. The museum took reservations several weeks in advance to fill the calendar dates as well as time slots each day. This way they were able to manage the demand by spreading out the attendance more evenly over the course of a day.

To further optimize queuing beyond the initial entry point, they disallowed back tracking within the venue and metered out optimally sized groups that could spend only a certain amount of time (e.g., 20 minutes) in each exhibit room. Most people I spoke with agreed that it helped enhance their experience as it regulated the number of people crowding each artifact. Which is important to note with respect to the museum staff given last week’s labor strike at the Louvre, where, as described by Digital Journal, “There can sometimes be 65,000 visitors on one day. No wonder they are stressed … they are constantly telling people, no flash photography, who don’t listen. The crowds get larger, but the staff does not.”

Posted by: Colin Mangham