Brand dissonance in
Jordan
To borrow and evolve a phrase; a brand is only as strong as
the worst part of the experience. Brand Dissonance, when over promising and
under delivering creates an added sense of frustration due to expectations
being unfulfilled or little effort is made to deliver on an implied quality of
experience. Dissonance has always been around, but brands today have a far more
difficult task of living up to the experiences they claim to offer and indeed
define their brands as being. Jordan seems to suffer greatly from this
condition, particularly at the customer service level and sometimes the basic
fulfillment of transactions.
Gone are the days when “branding” a product with a logo
would satisfy the customer with some quality assurance, as are the days when
making claims of differentiation were demonstrated within carefully controlled
environments, like on the product packaging, basic service or store space. Today customers are becoming accustomed to, and
indeed expect, a brand experience that is true at every touchpoint and at every
engagement, and that includes the simplest things in the customer journey, even
down to the parking experience outside your store, not to mention personalized
recognition or amazing mobile apps that improve my life and experience with a
brand. If a brand is to be defined as the sum of all the parts of a business,
then it goes to reason there needs to be a brand consideration for every aspect
of a business, and especially any aspect that engages customers, its
shareholders and stakeholders.
As brands have become more entrenched into our lives and
technology enables more mass customization, brands have moved from commodities,
to products to experiences in the span of a generation. Today brands have to
work harder to engage and win customers, not to mention the efforts to maintain
the relationships by adding value to their lives and attempting to become
indispensable. It has only made the task of creating genuine and meaningful
brand engagements more difficult and costly, particularly when said efforts are
un-genuine and ineffective.
Many brands in Jordan seem to be suffering from an
amplification of brand dissonance in recent years. Telcos and increasingly
banks are particularly good at raising expectations, almost to near impossible
levels, only for the real experiences to be frustrating, unfulfilled and
needlessly complicated. But even though the experiences we have are overall
better than many years ago, the amplification of the dissonance can be
attributed to a number of reasons. Higher expectations from customers as the
benchmark for brand experiences are raised with more competition, more exposure
to foreign best practice, partly due to the web but also from more regional and
foreign brands upping the stakes in Jordan. But ultimately it is hollow
campaign slogans and half baked efforts that make the experiences so much worse
because they fail to fulfill the expectations.
Customers have become more savvy at assessing and
scrutinizing the overall experience of engaging a brand as people are exposed
to global best practices that contrast heavily with what is experienced in
Jordan. Its amplified by the grossly exaggerated claims and dizzyingly
meaningless brand campaigns that reflect nothing of the reality, and in fact do
more damage to a brand and a business when the actual experiences contrast so
much.
Its almost advisable to set expectations low and surprise
and delight people with brand experiences, as the first thing people tend to do
these days when confronted with severe brand dissonance is share their
experience on social media, and sometimes, though much more rarely, share their
delight with positive brand harmony. Brands need to spend less money telling
people how great they are and more on showing them and demonstrating their
value propositions. Social Media can then let customers amplify your qualities
rather than experience dissonance and undo all your advertising and marketing
efforts.
There’s a trend in advertising that’s frankly refreshing,
where honesty to the point of self-deprecation is finding more resonance with
audiences. Even in subliminal ways brands are turning away from using beautiful
models and actors for their ads and instead using more homely, and in some
cases ugly people. It’s a movement towards making brands even more human, with
traits that most people would admire in real people, like humility, honesty and
genuine effort to self improve, something brands in Jordan need to consider.
(First appeared in Venture Magazine- Jordan, May 2013)
