NEWS
Employees key to marketing success
By Stan Sutter, May 8, 2003
The greatest potential brand assets for a company are inspired, productive and loyal employees, yet the marketing man behind the early successes of Nike and Starbucks says most companies fail to take proper advantage of them.
Seattle-based marketing consultant and author Scott Bedbury told attendees at the Brand Revival conference in Toronto Tuesday that poorly trained and badly informed employees do more harm than good, and turn into huge liabilities when they become poor ambassadors for the company and its brands.
Bedbury, who after being the head of advertising who put in place the "Just Do It" campaign at Nike was VP marketing at Starbucks from 1995 to 1998, said that a brand is the sum of everything a person thinks and feels about something. They quickly and indiscriminately "absorb the good, the bad and the ugly" associations, and nothing gets stuck faster and is harder to purge than a bad customer experience.
Bedbury emphasized that the key to the coffee giant's huge growth and popularity is the front line employees' belief in the product and the company's promise to be an oasis of calm for people between their homes and offices.
Bedbury noted that every Starbucks employee goes through an intensive two-day "Brew U" training school in which they are steeped in knowledge about coffee, its history, how it is made and Starbucks' product lines and ethos. He showed a video created in the early '90s by Starbucks agency Wieden & Kennedy which used a hidden camera to follow a man asking coffee house staff all around San Francisco for an obscure type of coffee. Almost every server responded with confusion or blank expressions, except the Starbucks employees who instantly spoke enthusiastically about the product.
"Our people actually saw us as doing something noble" for consumers, Bedbury said. But, he added, the company almost faltered when its early rapid growth meant the company wasn't able to consistently deliver on the Starbucks promise.
"We started to hire the enemy," professional restaurant service managers, or "fast foodies," from the likes of McDonald's and Taco Bell who were more focused on per-store unit sales than the in-store experience, he said. "Our best people started quitting" because the company culture was perceived as changing for the worse.
But Starbucks reasserted its insistence that it was in "the people business serving coffee" rather than the other way around.
Later in the day, Michael Beckerman, senior vice-president, marketing BMO Financial Group–and a colleague of Bedbury's at Nike in the late '80s and early '90s–also stressed the importance of getting employee buy-in first on any marketing and branding initiatives.
With 30,000 people at BMO, "employee culture is a huge issue for us," said Beckerman who noted that the bank's biggest challenge in the next three years is to ensure that the "base level client experience across the whole company and all distribution channels" is consistent.
BMO, he said, has an internal "Brand Council," that includes along with the senior marketing folks, people from the tech disciplines, corporate governance and human resources. Not only are they an important sounding board for marketing, but "they become your evangelists."
Too often in Canadian companies, he said, "decisions get made that compromise the customer experience in order to appease internal stakeholders. And marketers have to use all their tools to ensure that stops happening."
© 2003 Rogers Media Inc.
Employees key to marketing success
By Stan Sutter, May 8, 2003
The greatest potential brand assets for a company are inspired, productive and loyal employees, yet the marketing man behind the early successes of Nike and Starbucks says most companies fail to take proper advantage of them.
Seattle-based marketing consultant and author Scott Bedbury told attendees at the Brand Revival conference in Toronto Tuesday that poorly trained and badly informed employees do more harm than good, and turn into huge liabilities when they become poor ambassadors for the company and its brands.
Bedbury, who after being the head of advertising who put in place the "Just Do It" campaign at Nike was VP marketing at Starbucks from 1995 to 1998, said that a brand is the sum of everything a person thinks and feels about something. They quickly and indiscriminately "absorb the good, the bad and the ugly" associations, and nothing gets stuck faster and is harder to purge than a bad customer experience.
Bedbury emphasized that the key to the coffee giant's huge growth and popularity is the front line employees' belief in the product and the company's promise to be an oasis of calm for people between their homes and offices.
Bedbury noted that every Starbucks employee goes through an intensive two-day "Brew U" training school in which they are steeped in knowledge about coffee, its history, how it is made and Starbucks' product lines and ethos. He showed a video created in the early '90s by Starbucks agency Wieden & Kennedy which used a hidden camera to follow a man asking coffee house staff all around San Francisco for an obscure type of coffee. Almost every server responded with confusion or blank expressions, except the Starbucks employees who instantly spoke enthusiastically about the product.
"Our people actually saw us as doing something noble" for consumers, Bedbury said. But, he added, the company almost faltered when its early rapid growth meant the company wasn't able to consistently deliver on the Starbucks promise.
"We started to hire the enemy," professional restaurant service managers, or "fast foodies," from the likes of McDonald's and Taco Bell who were more focused on per-store unit sales than the in-store experience, he said. "Our best people started quitting" because the company culture was perceived as changing for the worse.
But Starbucks reasserted its insistence that it was in "the people business serving coffee" rather than the other way around.
Later in the day, Michael Beckerman, senior vice-president, marketing BMO Financial Group–and a colleague of Bedbury's at Nike in the late '80s and early '90s–also stressed the importance of getting employee buy-in first on any marketing and branding initiatives.
With 30,000 people at BMO, "employee culture is a huge issue for us," said Beckerman who noted that the bank's biggest challenge in the next three years is to ensure that the "base level client experience across the whole company and all distribution channels" is consistent.
BMO, he said, has an internal "Brand Council," that includes along with the senior marketing folks, people from the tech disciplines, corporate governance and human resources. Not only are they an important sounding board for marketing, but "they become your evangelists."
Too often in Canadian companies, he said, "decisions get made that compromise the customer experience in order to appease internal stakeholders. And marketers have to use all their tools to ensure that stops happening."
© 2003 Rogers Media Inc.
