The smell of burning pants

The other week my bank wrote me a letter. I've been a customer of this bank for nearly forty years, and for twenty of them have enjoyed the status of a 'Gold High Net Worth' client. The letter advised me that they wished to 'close three regional offices in order to streamline the service we bring to you'. It ended with the phrase 'this will enable us to be even more accessible to you'. My reaction to the correspondence was to think 'don't make me laugh'.

Last year, Royal Mail stuck a poster on our village postbox in Devon. It too announced that they were streamlining the incomparable service offered, and as a result there would now be just one collection instead of two. It didn't say 'so now you need only come here once a day' as a sop, but I'm sure if the writer had thought of it, the phrase would have gone in.

My weekend visitor read it, grinned, and said 'Pants'.

DIFFICULT RELATIONSHIPS

Whenever I go round most supermarkets now, there are notices everywhere telling me (and the other customers allegedly ripe for a 'relationship' with the store) all the new, exciting and selfless things the brand-owner is doing. The signs all say things like 'because we value you', 'so you don't have to', 'taking the pressure off your budget' and so forth.

Most of what they're doing is sensible (if not essential) commercial practice. It's just that I don't believe they're doing any of it for me –and I seriously doubt whether more than one per cent of the footfall differs from this world-weary view.

Much of this instore material also relates to the brand's loyalty card offers – which, while on the whole very successful, have led marketers to believe that this represents a 'relationship'. In reality, there are very, very few brands with whom customers want a relationship; and there are even fewer customers who think a loyalty card more important than the product being there or the service working.

While I have no problem at all with the concept of relationship marketing, it has encouraged the view – among some service providers – that being big means customers are positively gagging for a relationship with them. This is a terrifyingly tertiary level of plot amnesia: the preference of vast numbers of busy consumers in 2007 would be 'no relationship at all please, beyond delivering an effective solution thank you very much'.

Far too often, such 'solutions' solve management problems, not customer problems. Practically any durable technology product or utility service these days has a call centre. Go to the websites, and they will say the centres exist to (and I quote) 'speed up the 24/7 service we offer to our customers', or (another quote) 'bring you closer to our ongoing technical solutions'. Call centres don't exist for these reasons: they're there to cut the cost of servicing unreliable 'hi-tech' machinery, and avoid switchboards being jammed with calls from angry customers. They are, increasingly, walls behind which senior executives hide.

As a by-product of this, we occasionally get help; but I'd guess there cannot be many people left in the UK (beyond particularly sweet vicars) who think call centres are anything other than a way of dealing with customer truculence – such that nobody senior has to be hassled by any of it.

The same thing applies to out-of-stock in retail. If there's an empty box of leaves instead of the broccoli advertised at half-price and double points, it's not a 'solution' to offer the same price next time you're in, two melons on the same deal or money off at the till: the shopper decided to steam broccoli tonight, the brand pushed her firmly in the direction of that decision, and cut-price melons don't taste like broccoli, steamed or otherwise.

BALLS

As a marketing communications professional, this bizarre approach to customers concerns me greatly, because I think it threatens the future of credible branding in a very real sense. In fact, I have adopted an acronym for the practice. I call it BALLS: Brand as Liar-Liar Syndrome.

We are passing painfully through the 'pants on fire' decade – and false testimony in the witness box can have very serious consequences. If putting a brave face on something you screwed up as a brand doesn't cut it any more, then using a bare face that insults the customer's intelligence is downright stupid. I don't remember 'lie your head off badly' as being anywhere in the original lexicon of successful brand marketing, but then I am getting on a bit and it might have slipped my mind.

WHICH WAY ARE YOU LOOKING?

As long ago as 1997, the marketing head of a very large bank with whom I was working at the time told me 'We've got to be more customer-facing'. The idea that a brand should face that way did not exactly strike me as a breakthrough insight: what other way was there to face?

But the answer, of course, has been (over time) retailers, shareholders, City analysts, predators, merchant bankers – even accountants keen to 'take stuff to the bottom line', and thus poison those who wanted a slab of chocolate, but were awarded salmonella instead. Yes, on the whole you could say that for some brand owners these days, there are a lot of balls in the air.

So with all these balls to keep an eye on, there's no limit to which way you can face: and the easiest of the lot is away from the customer – 'Look, I'm busy doing business here – why not talk to this nice person in Thailand?'

Marketing needs to address and reverse this process for one overriding reason: if put off by selfimposed brand isolation, customers in 2007 can quickly find lots of other ways to get what they want – routes that don't involve the brand at all.

They can buy cheap unbranded Asian imports. They can go to web auctions, web warehouses, web grey sources, web swap-shops.

They can eschew call centres and go to the burgeoning ranks of independent young entrepreneurs offering quicker and far more expert service. (This is a huge growth area in the tackling of pc hardware and software problems –and as a regular user, I cannot recommend it too highly.)

They can download anti-Spam software, rather than, for example, trying to find a phone number at Microsoft.com ('We want to talk to you!' yells their website) or listening endlessly to the mendacity of ISP helplines.

In such an environment, the last thing we need is that respect for brands should decline at the same rate as that for politicians – and for the same reasons: a lack of substance in the spin.

Sadly, in most companies, marketers live in a silo that is entirely separate from the main point of contact customers have with the company – call centres. Because as any marketer should know, if there is a hostage to fortune, it will be kidnapped: say what you mean, and mean what you say.

Marketers need to engage with this brand-damaging process by championing either viable alternative (s) to call centres or increasing their power to (a) say yes and (b) refer up the line without the Stalingrad level of resistance to doing so.

Marketers are the custodians of the substance of brand identity and values, and should be developing brand activities that consistently confirm its 'testimony' in a world where the response to so much service puffery is, more and more, 'balls'.

This article featured in Market Leader, Autumn 2007.