We will call to your attention, articles and publications that we believe are worthy of your review, offering our rationale for recommending them.

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No one will ever admit that operational branding is easy, because it is not.

What I really like about this book is Leon Gorman’s straight talking, open narrative about the highs and lows of being the curator of one of this country’s most respected and admired brands.

Throughout the narrative, he includes the innermost thoughts of his senior leadership team in an effort to illustrate the true challenges of honoring the brand legacy he inherited, by living it in every phase of the business.

Leon Gorman’s ability to bare his soul, exposing his own weaknesses, second thoughts and deepest concerns about this inherited legacy, are truly inspiring.

Perhaps Bob Peixotto, SVP and COO, says it best:

“ For me as an employee I’ve loved L.L. Bean because it hasn’t been about making a buck. We made money and that was great. But it’s been about creating a social institution that could become something you could be very proud to be associated with.” (p. 178)

Another quote from David Garvin, HBS Professor and author of Managing Quality, states:

“…the first thing (Leon) did, was he stayed true to the vision, the second is that he knew how to enact that brand of values into product service. There is a perfect alignment between what the company stands for and what it has historically delivered for this product and service. Third, he built an extraordinary organization and management machinery. And then he attracted some very talented people.” (p. 274)

L.L. Bean has endured and will continue to endure as long as those entrusted with its leadership keep the spirit and values of L.L. Bean alive both in themselves and across the organization. This belief was a source of Gorman’s inner strength, providing him with the ability to make it through the difficult times when others would have changed course or been tempted to give up.

Given all of the brand practitioners who are advocating that we dissect the customer experience in minute detail, there’s definitely something to be said for keeping it simple.

The authors provide us with a well-reasoned approach to managing customers that is based on the following points:

• customers want better, not more differentiated products and services
• companies should place more executional focus on meeting customer’s basic needs
• “product categories matter more than individual brands” (p.13)

They further point out “that customers rarely buy a brand because it offers a unique feature or benefit. Rather, they usually buy the brand that they perceive as offering the best overall combination of category benefits.” (pgs. 23-24)

At the heart of the customer experience is the ability for executives, managers and relevant employees to understand more deeply how customers think and respond not just to our brand promises, but to the delivery of those promises on a consistent and meaningful basis. It’s refreshing to know that customer expectations are actually not that complicated. Unfortunately, we have a tendency and desire to make things a lot more complex than they need to be.

Simply Better belongs in every marketer’s and brand builder’s library if only to remind us that, when it comes to customers, it is better to keep things simple.

Managing Customers as Investments – Sunil Gupta and Donald R. Lehmann, Wharton School Publishing, 2005

What can we say about two distinguished scholars who have the ability to immerse themselves in complex research investigations and at the same time, share their findings in ways that are relevant to everyday marketing and branding practitioners?

Gupta and Lehmann are respected academics who also happen to have deep ties to the Marketing Sciences Institute, an organization that we highly respect.

Managing Customers as Investments advances one of the best arguments on the subject to date by bridging the all-to-often ignored gap that exists between marketing and finance. While we have for some time accepted the notion that customers should be seen as assets, we have not yet commonly adopted the belief that programs designed to attract and retain customers should be treated as investments. We have also not embraced the real link between customer and shareholder value because we have been too transaction versus relationship-oriented in our thinking.

The authors provide us with a number of very informative and data-rich chapters that outline the steps to understanding the investment value of customers.

We especially like Chapters 5 and 6, which speak directly to the ways an organization can retool to become more customer-based. There’s a lot of practical, actionable advice that marketers will find useful here.