Brand dissonance in Jordan

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)