Most people picture brand as a layer on top of the business: the logo, the colors, the tone of voice, maybe the ads. But customers also run into the product, the price, the wait, the person who answers the phone, and what a friend says after using it. Marketing is what we choose to say and show about the company. Words and images. Design and packaging. It matters, but it can’t replace what people feel when they actually interact with the product or service.
Customers only touch the outside of your business.
A shape has an interior as well as a surface, and most of what a business does happens inside, where customers never reach it. Getting a rider across town takes dispatch algorithms, dynamic pricing, payments, driver screening, and insurance, and almost none of it is Uber’s brand, because riders never touch it. What riders touch is a button and a car moving toward them on a map (sadly, they cannot yet dial down the smell of aftershave, but I won’t blame this on Uber).
Sometimes customers do see the inside. If you’ve ever had to repeat your account number to three departments, you’ve seen how that company’s systems operate, and you can probably make some assumptions about what it’s like to work there.
Your industry has some influence over your shape, and you decide the rest.
Every airline has to sell seats, board passengers, move bags, and deal with weather. Each one chooses its routes, whether to charge for bags, and how much legroom to give up for an extra row. And some of what passengers experience comes from decisions nobody made with passengers in mind, like switching to a cheaper call center.
You don’t have to accept everything your industry hands you. Some of the most distinctive businesses come from breaking an industry norm. Most retailers let anyone walk in; Costco charges an annual fee for the right to shop there. It also keeps its warehouses bare, does very little advertising, and has sold its hot dog and soda combo for $1.50 since 1985. The brand comes from those choices, so a competitor could copy the look of a Costco warehouse in a month and have nothing to show for it.
New packaging changes a juice brand more than new paint changes an airline.
New paint on an airline’s planes covers a sliver of what passengers touch. If the seats, delays, and change fees stay the same, people will describe the airline exactly as they did before.
Orange juice is different. On a grocery shelf, a shopper hasn’t tasted the juice yet, so what the company shows them on the carton is nearly all they have to go on. When Tropicana replaced its familiar orange-with-a-straw carton with a minimalist design in 2009, sales fell about 20% in two months, and the company brought the old carton back.
Growth moves more of your company away from customers.
As companies grow, more of their people work far from any customer, in finance, procurement, and operations.
In 2007, Howard Schultz wrote a memo to Starbucks leadership complaining that decisions made to support growth had worn down the experience. He pointed to automatic espresso machines tall enough to block customers’ view of their drink being made, and to sealed coffee bags that meant stores no longer smelled like fresh-ground coffee. Both were sensible decisions made inside the company for operational reasons, and both changed what millions of customers touched every day.
When a company is small, the founder covers most of the surface personally. As it grows, the standards the founder held in person have to be built into hiring, training, and policy, or customers stop experiencing them.
Marketing lives inside brand.
Marketing still matters. It’s how people find you and what they expect before they show up. But most of what they feel after that gets decided by the people setting prices, choosing vendors, buying software, and writing policy, whether or not anyone tells them they’re making brand decisions.