The Invisible Brand

Forget about apples and oranges...it’s donuts and cell phones

When most people think about branding, they think about things like logos, websites, and social media campaigns. While all of those are parts of a company’s identity, they are really just  components of what I call the Visible Brand. They are incredibly important (after all, a lousy website doesn’t exactly instill confidence), but organizations that focus on these elements often miss the big picture.

Every marketer has a slightly different concept of what a brand is, but the one I like most articulates the concept as the set of tangible and intangible elements that make a product or company unique. It might not be the perfect definition, but the idea of “tangible and intangible” really resonates with me. I’m convinced that most brands work—or don’t—because of a mix of the two. You’ve got to get both of them right.

The tangible things are fairly straightforward to do. Any competent marketing team can come up with a logo, a colour palette, and a basic brand identity. They can mix in lead generation, media relations, advertising, and any number of other outbound activities to support the brand. I’m not saying it’s easy to do it well, but at least there are proven roadmaps to execute these kinds of programmes.

The Invisible Brand is a lot harder to define, plan, and pull off because it includes things that most organizations don’t even consider to be part of their brand. Things like customer support. Things like technical support. Things like order and service fulfillment. Objectively speaking, all of these fall under the broader category of operations, but they all play a much bigger role in a company’s brand reputation than the Visible Brand.

As an example, let’s look at Tim Hortons. Timmy’s makes a good doughnut, but let’s be honest: it’s still just a doughnut. It’s not like the company is doing anything radical with its products. The coffee is okay, but there’s nothing special about it. And yet, Tim Hortons is consistently one of the top-rated brands in Canada.

It’s not because of the food, which is decent but certainly not worthy of a Michelin star. It’s not because of the logo, which is a slightly modified version of the founder’s signature. They may have a website, but who really looks up a doughnut shop online? So why is Tim Hortons such an iconic—even beloved—brand?

The answer is that they offer a GREAT customer experience in all of their 4,000+ stores. The shops are always clean, even at two in the morning when the late-night drunks stagger in looking for something to soak up the evening’s debauchery. The people working the counter are unfailingly polite, even to the aforementioned revelers who can barely form the word “cruller.” The food is ready in record time—even the drive-through lines move like a conveyor belt.

I’m not advocating a daily trip to get a box of Timbits, but what I AM saying is that the company has perfected the customer experience. Again, this isn’t one of those areas that has anything to do with marketing, but it has everything to do with building a great brand. This is the “invisible” part of the Invisible Brand. Other companies like Canadian Tire and TD also do well in brand reputation surveys, and it all comes back to customer service. They just get it.

The Dark Side

Now let’s look at the other side of the coin: Rogers. Objectively speaking, Rogers has an amazing brand. Their logo is EVERYWHERE. It’s hard to think of another Canadian company with such great brand penetration. And the logo is actually pretty awesome from a design point of view. Their philanthropic work is legendary, and they even have a good website and excellent advertising. I’d be happy to hire anyone from their marketing team to work for me because they clearly get it. And their service is also top-notch. I’ve used many mobile and cable providers over the years, and Rogers is at the top of my list. Even their pricing is pretty good.

And yet, the Rogers brand sits at the very bottom of just about every ranking of Canadian brand reputation. How can a company with so many awesome assets be so disliked? Why is there a Reddit page called “I Hate Rogers” that overflows with vitriol directed at one of the true pioneers of Canadian media? The answer is pretty easy: their customer experience is slightly worse than being in a North Korean prison camp. Rogers support, both phone and online, is apparently designed to infuriate and alienate customers. The only way it could be worse is if Rogers crews showed up in the bedrooms of their customers at 4:00 a.m. and started playing the bagpipes. I can tell you firsthand that it is a genuinely awful experience, and most Canadians will echo that sentiment. Hell, even Rogers employees admit it!

I don’t know what the internal operations of Rogers are like, but I’m 100% sure that the technical support and customer support teams aren’t integrated with the brand teams. That’s too bad, because while the marketing people are doing a world-class job building a strong corporate identity, the support folks are coming in behind them and laying waste to their good work, one call at a time. If I worked in the Rogers marketing department, I would hate coming to work every day knowing that everything I did was going to be sabotaged by “support” teams that actively hate their own customers.

This is the power of the Invisible Brand: a company that makes an average product (that thousands of other companies also make) is beloved, while one that is a true innovator and trailblazer is reviled. It has nothing to do with logos, or colour palettes. It all comes back to how these companies treat their customers. Because no matter what kind of business you’re in, that’s really what matters. That’s your brand.