Service Innovation

A recent post on Daily fix brought up the issue of brand personality recently. They focussed upon the e-mail confirmation a reader received from CD baby for some CDs that were ordered (link). There then ensued an interesting discussion about the way companies formulate texts to customers. Heres the original text from the letter:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, November 18th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.

Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year.’ We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh…

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little store with the best new independent music

Working together with an insurance company, as we do in AT-ONE, the question of familiarity and personality often crops up and this discussion interests me a lot.

A brand should be considered as having a personality, and tone of voice should therefore base itself upon the brand personality. An established insurance company has a totally different personality to a geeky CD store and should therefore use wording that fits. However, a challenger could take a different personality and use this to advantage to cut out the stuffiness of insurance, which risks being outdated these days. At AHO we have developed what we call the megaphone model of brand expression. This basically focusses upon defining the company DNA, then giving this DNA a personality which is then carefully broadcast to all touchpoints through behaviours. The human model is a good analogy and allows for tone of voice to take the important role it has.

Tags: Brand, Experience, Personality