Last weekend I had to get the train down to the coast once again, so armed with my vouchers from National Express I approached the ticket desk at London Liverpool Street and asked the man (dressed in National Express uniform) behind the counter for a return ticket.

Upon advising him that I was going to be paying with vouchers I was met with a surly sarcastic response about how “oooh, vouchers are our FAVOURITE form of payment”. Confused by his attitude I questioned if he was intending to be sarcastic or not. He replied, in an equally sarcastic tone, “no, of course not, we just LOVE vouchers. Of course come the end of the year the company accounts will be £50 short because of your vouchers so there will undoubtedly be a fare increase next year to cover the loss, but that’s just fine. Thank you.”

*BUMP*

The customer experience of National Express returns to earth with an almighty crash.

As it happens, the oscillator of my Superlative Certified Swiss Chronometer has always exhibited arrhythmia. Over the course of a few days, it will happily gain a couple of minutes but I’ve got used to its idiosyncratic approach to time-telling which for the most part has generally made me slightly more punctual.

Anyway, this isn’t an attempt to deconstruct the rational or irrational behaviour of spending several thousand quid on something that one could spend £5 on and find it does the primary job of telling the time just as well if not better than your average chronometer.

No, this is about the relationship the brand continues to have with you when things go wrong or there is a need for some kind of dialogue. You see, Rolex recommend that the watch is serviced around 5 years mark.  Not that they’ve ever reminded me.  Mine is about 6 years old now but over the Christmas period something inside the stainless steel, expertly crafted one-piece oyster shell of my Explorer II started to vibrate whenever I moved my wrist. And then, just before New Year, the precision-engineered Oyster movement, the ‘height of precision, robustness and guaranteed long term performance’ just kind of….stopped….

So, last weekend I marched into my authorised Rolex agent, expecting staff to jump into action, the watch to be gently but expediently strapped to a watch stretcher, the Rolex helicopter to land  and my watch whisked off for the very best private-care and convalescence before being chauffer driven to my own front door and returned to my wrist in full health a couple of weeks later.

But no. Apparently, I was nonchalently informed, events like this are perfectly usual issues for swiss-engineered superlative chronometers. True or not, the fact that owning the watch might imply I’m a high-octane, adventure fuelled, every second counts kind of guy who relies on their choice of timepiece for accurate split-second, life or death decision-making doesn’t resonate in the quiet corridors and laboratories of Rolex. It would seem there’s no

time like Rolex time. I’ve got to wait between 14 and 16 weeks – yes upto 4 months (or 10,368,000 seconds to be accurate) before I can be repatriated with my son’s heirloom and I’m going to be expected to pay for the pleasure too.

So come on Rolex, if you can’t crank up your servicing mechanisms, surely there is something you could do at this point in the relationship to reaffirm my investment or even better re-ignite my relationship! How about offering a ‘courtesy watch’? Might that not encourage the idea of multiple watch ownership – trialling something a bit sportier or dressier in the interim period?  Oh, and it’s my wife’s 40th birthday just around the corner. But then you didn’t know that did you because you’ve never asked. Tant pis!

Via Adland TV

To anyone who’s read my previous posts it will also come as a surprise that I would be praising a rail company, but believe it or not here it comes…

Just before Christmas I had to make an urgent trip from London to Essex. I arrived at Liverpool Street station, checked the departure time of my train, shovelled a big wedge of cash into the ticket machine and just as my tickets printed out the automated departures and arrivals board lit up in a frenzy of flashing lights as one-by-one the trains changed from ‘On Time’ to ‘Cancelled’, ‘Bus Service’ or ‘Delayed’. Mine was cancelled. The tickets, still warm from the printer, cowered in my clenched fist.

I then embarked on the most excruciating train journey of my life. Both the outward and return journeys were subject to cancellations, delays, lack of onboard refreshments due to a broken boiler, overcrowding and general displeasure.

On my return I set about drafting a letter of complaint to the train company responsible, National Express. Seeing as there has been a lot of talk of will they/won’t they mergers with Stagecoach recently I wasn’t holding my breath in getting a positive response to my request for a full, and immediate, refund.

As Christmas set upon us I received a letter from National Express to inform me that they had read my letter and would attempt to come back to me within 6 days. Actually, it was more like 15, but hey, it was Christmas and who’s counting? I was stunned to receive another letter the other day profusely apologising for the ‘unforgiveable’ experience I had had to endure that day on the train, and explaining the reasons for the delays/cancellations but in a tone that was more apologetic and responsible than blame-ridden and bitter. Neatly tucked in the folded letter were vouchers for rail travel (on ANY network in the UK) for not only the full return fare but for the full fare + 25%.

Now, I’m not too sure whether it should be a big cheer for National Express per se, or a big cheer for the cranky insistence of a grump like me, but regardless, I thought the communications tone, and the ‘above and beyond’ value of the vouchers were a great example of a brand’s ability to create a positive experience out of a bad one. Well done National Express.

The answer from @hjonesy (that’s our Helen) was as profound as it was immediate: it’s a social experiment; something to try to see if it works. And I think she’s hit the nail on the head.  This isn’t about music. This isn’t about the X-Factor, Simon Cowell, wee Joe, or some funny fellas in hoods. It’s about the most seismic shift in consumer behaviour that has happened for a generation, that has started in earnest in 2009.

If there is one thing that we are to remember 2009 for it must be the rise of social media and its ability to empower people, en mass and as individuals, as never before. For providing the opportunity for a single voice to express an opinion and for that opinion to join with others that are similar; growing, developing and coagulating as more and more join in, until their presence can no longer be ignored.  Until their presence is so great that it becomes more significant than the subject that inspired the first voice to be raised. Until the desired and necessary change occurs.

Think Jan Moir. Think Trafigura. Even watch Gordon Brown on TED (no, do). In 2009 we have passed the tipping point at which the balance of power shifts from corporations and institutions (the brands) to the people. It marks the point at which brands have to start to think and operate differently. The point from which no organisation can ever be forgiven for putting itself first and for not taking its responsibilities to its audience, or the wider world, seriously.

Now, the RATM movement isn’t quite the real thing just yet. As Helen says, it’s an experiment rather than a genuine desire for a Christmas No.1 of one type versus another. It’s wrapped up with the irony that the real winner is Sony BMG who have both artists on their label – some will argue that the ‘enemy’ ends up winning after all. But that’s to miss the point. The enemy here isn’t Sony, or Cowell. It’s the old way of doing things. The past. And, in 2009, it’s been defeated.

I’m looking forward to 2010.

When Tiger Woods made a statement apologising for “not being true to my values” he revealed the depth of his fraud. Just how ‘true’ are those ‘values’, Tiger? Given the extent to which he is now known to have flaunted them, clearly they are not true at all. Tiger, your values are the things that define your behaviour, not the things you think sponsors want to hear. You can’t just say them, you have to live them. If you are consistently doing bad things then you have bad values. Simple as that. When you’re aware of your actions (he wasn’t sleepwalking) to claim your values as anything else is just yet another lie.

Harsh? No. Prior to the scandal in 2001, Enron’s publicly stated values were “communication, respect, integrity, and excellence”. When their deception became apparent their Directors went to jail and corporate accounting practices were changed forever. That’s what can happen when you lie about your values. You might argue that Enron, as a big business, is different. Except that it isn’t. Tiger Woods career earning surpassed the $1 billion mark earlier this year – that’s big business enough. The vast majority of that $1bn is made from sponsorship deals and the size and scope of those deals is, in part at least, based on those same ‘values’ that Tiger claimed to have, but didn’t. The deals get renewed and extended because the public respect Woods for the values he appears to project. Which we now know are a con. Of course in Tiger’s case, he hasn’t broken any laws (apart from a minor traffic offence) so he’s not going to jail. But it’s a form of branded deception nonetheless.

But in the short term, at least, Woods may survive this. His sponsors may be too timid to drop him. But his ‘values’ will be forever changed. If he continues to claim the lie then his appeal to the public and to sponsors will spiral downwards and his longer-term propects are certainly less good. Although were he to be honest at this point and declare his values for that they really are, then perhaps he could even end up prospering even more.

After all, it turns out he’s way more fun than we thought.

As one of the many slaves to Apple who clamoured for an iPhone as fast as my legs could carry me, I was, once again, forced to sign up with O2 as they held the exclusive contract, with Apple, to supply the iPhone .

I had been a customer of O2 for many years previously (circa 7 or 8 yrs) before I left to join Orange for an 18 month spell. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting O2 to lay out the proverbial red carpet or even wave a little flag for me upon my return, but part of me did think “A long-term defected customer is returning. What generous offer can you give me to welcome me back?”. The answer to any query I had was a big fat no. I even asked the customer service assistant in the O2 shop when I went to get my iPhone , but I didn’t get anywhere.

They just didn’t care.

They knew that they held the ultimate power in the consumer/service provider face-off. They knew that if I REALLY wanted an iPhone, I would siphon the milk from my (dead) grandmother’s tea in order to get my hands on one if need be. They didn’t need to offer me anything as a returning customer, they had me right where they wanted me (aka: signing my life away on a binding contract for an exorbitant monthly fee).

Then after the first few months of waving my iPhone around in the faces of those stuck in contracts with other providers, Vodafone and Orange announce within 48 hours of each other that they are also going to be supplying the iPhone in due course.

I quickly glanced at my phone in anticipation of a call from O2 for some serious ‘stroking’ and offers of a plentiful bounty of treats were I to stay with them and not defect, once more, to Orange or Vodafone. But that call didn’t come…and it still hasn’t. I doubt it ever will.

It strikes me, as a mobile phone user, that the service provider brands just seem to have given up the ghost in terms of wanting to create, and more importantly maintain, brand loyalty. It’s less about the service they provide now and more about the products they supply us with. They are a vehicle for the phones to market, and no more.

Sure, their advertising might be really appealing and their brand may ‘look’ glossy and attractive, but that’s really where their ‘brand’, as an experience, seems to end. Mobile service providers have become like commodities these days. They’re no longer chosen based on the strength of their brand, or how great their customer service is. They are chosen based on two factors:

1. Do they provide the phone I want?

2. Are they the cheapest?

I would like (and expect) more for my money. O2, you need to start seeing me as a ‘valued customer’ as opposed to just a standing order sum being deposited into your account each month. If not, my iPhone and I will be taking a walk down the road to Vodafone or Orange. Frying pan – fire? Maybe…I challenge you to make me change my mind.

Nokia viNe Brand Design from James Temple on Vimeo.

However, fret not, as deliveries of the important stuff – the parcels and presents ordered up to the 11^th hour from on-line retailers such as Amazon and John Lewis are destined to find their way to their recipients in a timely and reliable fashion. These businesses you will not be surprised to hear have opted to drop Royal Mail in favour of alternative providers. There are unfortunately some on-line retailers who won’t have that choice.  Just as Britain is trying to fight its way out of recession, not only will Royal Mail potentially lose over £100m of combined letter and packet business, the disruption could cost general business over £220m in direct lost business and increased delivery expense not to mention damage to reputation and customer loyalty.

So it would seem that the current dispute of Royal Mail employees with the management over pay, conditions and modernisation plans continues to erode not just the trust and reputation of another institutional brand but ultimately drive it closer to the edge of an inevitable precipice.

Sure, the history, politics and organisational issues that underpin the machinations of Royal Mail and the current dispute are complicated but the stark reality is much simpler. This is a business model that makes little commercial sense or in its current guises delivers a relevant consumer service for modern Britain.

Royal Mail was created in 1516 by Henry VIII when he established a Master of the Posts. It was no doubt of formidable use in days gone by for sending threatening letters to the French or Scots, communicating with your army, courting another potential wife or demanding taxes and favours.

But today, my letterbox at home is rarely straining under the weight of anything of such urgency, value or contempt.  Bank statements, mobile phone bills, energy bills,  tax returns, passport and driving licence applications are all now managed on-line. In our fast-paced digital society, we can’t wait a few hours, let alone a day or two to for a piece of communication to wind its way through the ‘Snail Mail’ plumbing.

So what future for our postal champion and its significant army of foot soldiers?

The solution for Royal Mail is to leverage its capabilities in a more effective and innovative manner.  It benefits from an amazing local community presence and infrastructure. It just needs to mobilise it and charge for it in a more valued and valuable way.

Perhaps Royal Mail should consider stopping those daily letterbox deliveries of increasing amounts of junk mail.  Household mail only accounts for about 10% of volume anyway.  Apart from certain government departments, rarely do we send anything of real urgency or value through the postal system.  Perhaps we need to be educated that we should go and collect our mail from the local Post Office.  Use the Post Office as a micro-sorting office from where we rent our own PO Box for a convenient Saturday morning collection before popping to the coffee shop next door to peruse it.

Equally, Britain is a universe of micro and small and medium sized enterprises. These smaller businesses need to move things around and most often within a fairly narrow geography and relatively minor window of time.

Couldn’t Royal Mail do this? Couldn’t Royal Mail be exactly the kind of local community logistics champion that we could really use on a daily basis.

With assets out on the roads local independent grocers or traders who can’t compete with the likes of Ocado can offer to deliver direct with Royal Mail. Plumbers, electricians and tradesmen can call suppliers for parts and have them picked up and delivered by Royal Mail within 90 minutes. For domestic customers, dry cleaning can be delivered or collected and  those cakes you’ve baked for old Mrs Jones who lives on the other side of town can be sent and received and still be warm.  Maybe if I’m really running late, they can pick up and deliver my kids home from nursery.

Now that really would indicate a level of trust and give valued meaning to those letters within the Royal Mail brand name that make it a service we can all be proud of.

But in this case, no such conversations need take place.  That’s because the drawing has been produced not by a well-remunerated corporation, but by a child. It is the work of nine-year-old Florence Jackson, from Bristol, who was one of 17,000 children who entered a BBC Blue Peter competition to design the new coin. The media, the public, most (not all) designers, when they know that it is designed by a child, will soften their eyes and celebrate, rather than criticise its flaws. And, even if they missed the press release, no one’s going to be in any doubt about its youthful provenance because the design is so obviously juvenile. Crude, puerile and naïve her art may be, but in the context of such a competition these are exactly the criteria that the competition judges would have desired. Indeed, I am confident to assume that many more accomplished submissions will have been rejected for being too good; not childlike enough. This competition was never about the quality of the design but what it is that the design represents.

This highlights a crucial aspect of human judgment that applies to design and much more widely beyond. It’s the reason why brand consultancy is not only the most important discipline in the marketing mix but a critical component of modern business strategy. It might even help us to define what “brand” means. Yep, I’m making a big deal of this one, because I think Florence has hit on something important here.

To up the ante a little from 50p, let me ask you a question about another piece of art. If the Madonna of the Pinks that hangs in The National Gallery turns out, as some suspect, not to be by Raphael but a fake, is it worth less than the £22M it cost to buy? Philosophically, the painting could be said to exist in two parallel universes. One, where it marks a brave and progressive watershed in the history of religious portraiture that inspired not just art but generations of social history. Another, where it is simply a derivative work by a talented, yet insignificant forger. Physically, the two universes of the paintings collapse into one – its tangible attributes are the same. Intellectually, they are forever apart.

Old Masters may be an extreme example but the point is this: we judge things not for what they are but for what we think they mean. To truly understand something we need to look beyond its tangible qualities and consider its intangible attributes too. We seek to explain what we see (hear, touch, taste, or smell) by giving it a back-story – a meaning beyond the physical experience it provides. The Madonna of the Pinks is not just a well-executed painting of the Madonna and child but a landmark moment in art history. Florence’s coin is more than a badly drawn picture, it represents the hope, potential, and the carefree joy that only a child would have the courage to see, yet to which all adult human beings aspire.

Don’t just take my word for it. This aspect of human intellect is a fundamental philosophical concept. In the 4^th Century BC, Aristotle defined hypokeimenon, literally meaning the “underlying thing”, as the quality that sits behind a thing’s physicality and persists through any change. In the 13^th Century John Duns Scotus described haecceity, literally “thisness”, as the quality of a thing that differentiates it from another with identical form (where its form expressed in generic terms is called quiddity, or “thatness”). Neuroscientists have explored these concepts in their analyses of how the human brain makes decisions, examining the complexity of the relationship between rational and emotional processing. Some, like Chris Frith, even suggest that rational decision-making is an illusion created by our own brain to defend us from the incomprehensible reality of our truly irrational selves. The scientific and philosophical facts are clear: things are not as simple as they seem.

And this helps us explain what a brand is. A brand is the complete set of criteria upon which the human brain decides. (Note that lower order mammals don’t use ‘brands’, just sub-conscious instincts; they don’t ‘decide’.) Brands are a complex interdependency between rational and emotional propositions where each works to shape and explain the other. They are about hypokeimenon (essence), haecceity (differentiation) and quiddity (experience) and touch not just logos and marketing but every aspect of what an organisation thinks and does. It follows then, that managing a brand requires profound and holistic consideration, with the intellect and imagination of a deeply enquiring mind. If we are to believe Chris Frith, then it’s the most important thing that any business should consider, overriding all the rational considerations that businesses typically prioritise in their plans.

Of course some philosophers (the empiricists and phenomenalists) disagree with this point of view. For them, a thing is no more than its tangible self: The Madonna of the Pinks is just paint on canvas, worth no more than, say, 50p. They would consider a conversation about brands to be an exercise in vanity and a waste of money and time. Such people should be introduced to Florence. Sometimes it takes the perspective of a nine-year-old to help you open your eyes.