Issue No. 19 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a book on branding and a bucket on proofreading. (It’s all in the details.) “Emotional Branding builds a powerful relationship between a consumer and a brand. It acknowledges that brands don’t belong to corporations–they belong to people. Brands live in the hearts of the people who love them, making it the brand steward’s job to cultivate the relationship by sparking more meaningful connections.” (Marc Gobe’, founder and CEO of desgrippes gobe’ group, one of the world’s top ten brand image creation firms)
During the early years of EarthLink Inc., one of the nation’s largest online service providers, its CEO would spend 30 minutes at the end of each day calling new customers. (He died of complications from cancer last week. Garry Betty was 49.)
What CEO could possibly afford to spend 30 minutes a day interacting with customers? And why? This week’s book quotes Lee Iacocca, the former chairman of Chrysler Corporation, “If you take care of your customers, everything else will fall into place.”
Someone on your team MUST read Citizen Brand: 10 Commandments for Transforming Brands in a Consumer Democracy, by Marc Gobe’. The 10 commandments: 1) Evolve from Consumers to People, 2) Evolve from Honesty to Trust, 3) Evolve from Product to Experience, 4) Evolve from Quality to Preference, 5) Evolve from Notoriety to Aspiration, 6) Evolve from Identity to Personality, 7) Evolve from Function to Feel, 8) Evolve from Ubiquity to Presence, 9) Evolve from Communication to Dialogue, and 10) Evolve from Service to Relationship.
If your customers (donors, clients, guests, members, volunteers, employees) are more appreciative of their experience at Starbucks than their interaction with you, buy the book.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Who is our organization’s brand steward? What does a brand steward do all day?
2. How could we spark more meaningful connections with our customers?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Insights from the Management Buckets Workshop Experience
More than two million journalists own the AP Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, the bible of the Associated Press. This invaluable resource includes more than 5,000 entries on grammar, spelling, punctuation (there is no period in Dr Pepper), capitalization, abbreviations (Calif., not CA), misused words (Canadian geese) and the correct names of countries, organizations, Arabic words and brand names.
Every publication editor and website writer in your organization should care about consistency—it enhances your brand. Order the current edition from Amazon (above) or check out the online version at www.APStylebook.com, or pre-order the July 2007 edition.
In our Management Buckets Workshop Experience, you’ll learn best practices for protecting your brand from typos, glitches and “clerical errors” in The Systems Bucket, one of 20 Critical Competencies Required for Leading and Managing Today’s Nonprofit Organization. Email me for the 2007 workshop dates.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. According to the AP Stylebook, there are eight U.S. states that should never be abbreviated in newsletters or websites, unless listed as an address (example: Seattle, WA 98119). What are they? (Answer: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, Texas and Utah
#2. Are we protecting our brand effectively by consistently using an agreed upon stylebook?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Download the Management Buckets brochure
PS. Click “Forward Email” below to recommend this free eNews to a colleague.
