Have you ever been disappointed that your usual white chocolate mocha from your favorite coffee shop was a little too cold or not sweet enough?  What about when you scored a reservation at a hot new restaurant that’s been getting rave reviews but you were really let down by poor service and bland food?  Maybe you called tech support for help with your home computer and had to deal with a rep who was clueless and a bit hostile. 

If this has ever happened to you, then you’ve experienced a brand gap. This is what happens when a customer has an expectation of a brand that has fallen short of reality. A brand gap can leave you feeling ripped off, let down, annoyed.  Your opinion of the brand probably just took a nose dive, and you might even blog or Twitter about your experience. 

In his book Zag, the #1 Strategy of High Performance Brands, Marty Neumeier defines a brand as a “person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.”  If his definition holds true, than how do brand gaps impact that gut feeling that you might have about a product, service, or company?

Your company has worked long hours to get your brand where it is today.  But it all comes down to what’s being delivered to your customers that counts.  If you’re not fulfilling on the promise of your brand to your customers, you’re out of alignment, and you’re putting your brand in jeopardy.

This is where internal-external marketing alignment becomes a powerful strategy in fulfilling your brand promise and avoiding the brand gaps.  It starts with creating a common vision of your brand that is supported by every function of your business, not just marketing.  Creating that common vision can begin by answering these three questions: 

1. What business are you in? This might seem like a simple question, but look deeper than the obvious. What business are you really in? It’s less about the specific product or service and more about the experience you create for your customers. What are you there to create for your customers?
2. What is your promise to your customer? Think about what your customers expect from you - not just the tangible, but the intangible. If your brand is a gut-feeling, as defined above by Neumeier, your business has an emotional deliverable. What do you want the gut-feeling to be?
3. Where are your brand gaps? Talk to your customers. Call your customer service line and pretend to be a customer. Perform an informal mystery shop. Listen to what people are saying about your brand in the social media world. Start to identify all the brand gaps that are currently in place and where you’re most vulnerable to new ones.

Once you’ve answered these questions, you have the foundation to begin leveraging the power of your brand in every corner of your business including marketing, sales, human resources, training, operations, administration, and more.  This is where internal-external marketing alignment begins.  This is where you have the power to truly build your brand, starting at the purest grassroots level within your company.

We’ll talk more in future posts about brand gaps and how to uncover where they’re happening in your company.  Tell us about any brand gaps you’ve experienced as a customer and how they’ve changed your gut feeling of a brand.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.