[MUSIC] Welcome to module four, where we're going to focus on two concepts, brand practices and brand engagement. One is really at the organization level, what can we do with our processes, internal processes, especially HR? And the second one is more at the individual level, how do I get our own employees to get the brand sort of into their head, heart, and hands so they can actually deliver on the brand promise? That will be part of a separate video. I'll focus mainly on brand practices in this video, but what I will do is embed it in some of the lessons we've had in earlier videos. So if you go back to module two, we talked about customer satisfaction. And we talked about that customer satisfaction is really the difference between what we experience as customers and consumers and what we expect. And we talked about how traditionally marketing is really about the brand promise, which is about expectations often about raising those expectations. So if the delivery, which results in the customer experience stays the same, and we raise the expectations, satisfaction might actually go down. And we also reflected upon how yes, our product and our services are at the heart of customer satisfaction, but the experience that sort of wraps around it, all those touch points are typically manned by people. At least in the background, they’re creating those touch points either directly or indirectly. And what's interesting is to take a little bit of historical detour, you might have heard of Adam Smith, his face is actually on our 20 pound note here in the UK, he was focused on this concept of efficiency. Remember we talked about efficiency, effectiveness, and experience? And it was all about division of labor and how do we more efficiently produce? And this concept of experience, he reflected upon it. He thought about people like entertainers, for example, who provide this experience and he called this unproductive labor. Almost equivalent to waste, and what we're going to reflect upon is how actually people are at the heart of differentiation, the heart of the experience. And we have to work very, very hard as an organization to ensure that they deliver the brand in the right way. So if we go back to, kind of this very basic seven step progress, which might not happen linearly, but there are seven discreet concepts first, to think about. The first one, was really about the brand purpose. And in module one, when we introduced this MOOC, it was all about understanding the purpose and how that can drive the organization, attract customers and employees alike. In module two, we talked about the purpose, sort of ing the purpose, thinking about the doing that stands behind it, from a customer standpoint, here it's really about the employees. How do we deliver on that purpose? The second step was mapping the customer journey, and that that really is the spine of our delivery of value. And the third was about the touch points, matching the employees to those touch points. And now we come to this idea of how do we create these brand acts or brand behaviors? And I'll really talk about that process and how that then in stage five is embedded in brand practices and brand engagement. And finally, in the next MOOC, we'll talk about measuring basically returns to brand, brand health and so forth. And what's critical there is, at each of these stages, people are central to these steps. So if we work backwards from the seventh step, it's measurement. Well, how do we reward our people based on what measures? If we think about the practices in engagement, we're talking about the HR practices, where the employee, through their career really go through various corporate processes. We think about the individual level of engagement, when we think of the fifth step, when we think about the alignment, we're thinking about codes of behavior we talked about in the last module, about how we need to align those codes of behavior. Because you have to act on codes which are very similar. And finally, we talked about the employee journey and how that feeds into the different touch points. The customer journey, where our front line employees often have great insight, and finally, the purpose, which not just delivers to customers, but also it motivates employees. So let me walk through that and maybe embed it in a narrative about an airline I greatly admire. I guess the whole world admires this airline, it's Southwest Airlines. For those of you who don't know Southwest Airlines, they are pioneer in kind of low cost travel. And they emerged roughly 45 years ago and at time when business travel was really what air travel was all about. And regular people could not really afford business travel, they might drive themselves, take a bus, a train. Or Southwest really also competed with your living room, people would stay at home. So that was the setting which Southwest emerged. They've been profitable in all but they're first year of operation, and this is in an industry which has never been profitable as a whole, worldwide. So it's some of the toughest environment, where this low cost carrier has been hugely profitable. At some point, if not today, they're still the airline with the highest market cap in the world. So the most valuable airline. Now the question is, how did they do this? And if you go back to their brand promise, if you think about, in the first module we talked about Volvo being about safety and safe, Disney about magical, Southwest has really two elements they drive. One is cheap and one is cheerful, okay? And we're going to figure out, which of those two leads to their success? Well, I'll tell you right now, it is cheerful because cheap is actually easy to copy. I can copy their, sort of nuts and bolts of their operations, but I cannot copy the cheerfulness that their people bring to the job. So let's step through this step by step. Step one was the purpose. The original purpose of Southwest was freedom to fly. So it's all around freedom about getting regular people the freedom to travel. And that's really where cheap is essential because they had to get their operations down to a price point which allowed people to travel in the first place. And maybe in terms of their behaviors, I'll just fast forward a little bit. So they invented certain modes of travel. Most airlines today, like United Airlines in the US, they have their hub for example, in Chicago and they have this hub and spoke system, where you have connecting flights through Chicago. What that does, it really delays flights because you have to wait for several flights to connect to yours, stay on the ground longer. So the airplanes are in the air about six and a half hours a day. What the name of the game here is to get to cheap, you've got this big asset, the airplane, and you've got to make your asset sweat. So Southwest has to get the plane up and running as fast as possible. And they managed to do that early in their existence, when actually the leasing company took away one of their airplanes, because they didn't have the money. So they had to figure out how to fly the same route with three planes instead of four. And they invented this ten minute turnaround at the time, I think it's more like 20 minutes today. But basically, it was about getting people on and off the plane as quickly as possible. And getting the plane up and running as quickly as possible. Which meant things like no kitchen on the flight, because it takes time to clean up to get the food on and off. They don't even have sleeves in the pockets in the seats in front of you because, again, that takes cleaning. As a matter of fact, the attendants will go through the plane and ask passengers to give them their rubbish before the plane lands, so the cleaning crew has less to do. They do not use those gangways to the plane. Instead they use stairs at the front and the back so people get on and off as quickly as possible. Two doors is quicker than one. Also, not having a kitchen, not having business class, squeezing the seats together a little bit, they have a higher load factor. So they make that asset more valuable every time it flies. Other innovations are they never fly hub and spoke, they only fly point to point. They fly to secondary airports, which have less congestion. So their planes are in the air longer. And finally, at least in the early days, you would actually not even get a ticket. Tickets cost money to print. They didn't have travel agents either. They had direct sales. But by not having a ticket, you also didn't have a seat. So you tried to arrive early in the airport because you would stand in line earlier to board the plane, which means the luggage would make it to the plane earlier and more quickly. It also meant that you had to choose a seat. So even if you're late boarding, you'd rush onto that plane to try to get an aisle or a window seat. So all of this, all of these are brand behaviors because they act in unison to deliver on cheap. But it's that whole purpose that drives the behavior of the people. So, purpose, if you will, this is kind of, if you think about it, this is what is the difference you make in people's lives. You allow them to fly. At the brand level, this is your point of differentiation and if you think about at the behavior level or the culture of the organization, this is what makes you different. This is how you're different as an organization. And even the pilots on Southwest will be negotiating with the flight tower to get a different flight path, maybe get a bit more wind to shave a few seconds off the flight path. So purpose is absolutely central to what they do. [MUSIC]
