11/11/13

Reputation management: the true goal of after-market excellence?

As many of our customers and partners will know, I am an avid follower of Apple and a voracious reader of various books on its history and ethos.

I’m certainly now alone in that of course. I suppose there are many of us hoping for a bit of their ‘magic’ to rub off and to discover that missing ingredient that might work for us. Beyond anything else we seem to admire the Apple brand and revere the company; indeed even when it was close to extinction and forced to sell its soul to Microsoft ( the incarnate devil and arch enemy!) it somehow still seemed to be loved by everyone ( even though we weren’t buying its products); everyone seem to want it to survive and willed it to win. 

Why was/is the Apple brand so strong and so iconic? 

Was it the romance and glory of the ultimate garage start up story (Fortune 500 in record time)? {although history will show that HP started in a garage 30 years beforehand and grew to global scale}. 

Was it the maverick leadership of Steve Jobs himself? 

Was it beautiful design in a sea of boring grey boxes? 

Was it cool products that somehow captured how our lives could change from the moment we used them? Ask anyone who had an Apple IIe how much better it was than anything else, or how simple to use was the first Mac, how quickly a two-year–old can use an iPad… 

Who knows? But whatever it was, the fairy dust did and still does emanate from Apple. The rest of us look on in awe and marvel at the power of such brands to the companies they embody. 

In reality for Apple it was probably all of these reasons and more, as reputation and brand values are built layer on layer, year on year, and personal experience upon personal experience – each and every touch point adding to the whole. 

So having recently read “Insanely simple…by Ken Seagall,” a brilliant read from a core marketing executive at Apple’s agency and then hearing about the ousting of Charles Morgan (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-24759054) from Morgan Cars (close to home in Malvern); I got thinking about brands and stuff; and once again the importance of brand and all its unquantifiable features, built often over years of customer experiences came to the fore. With a lot of noise in the twitter sphere over Morgan’s removal from his eponymous firm, I wondered why companies would jeopardise these intangible brand values? 

As an outsource partner it is essentially the maintenance and protection of these brand values that we in the after-sales space embody. As Peter Drucker the grandfather of outsourcing said: “Do your best and outsource the rest”.  

As experts in service delivery and the frontline customer experience we ensure our clients brands are maintained, protected and enhanced. Brand and reputations which, as Morgan found, take years to build and only seconds to lose.