Creating a good brand in Singapore

Singapore’s rapid marketplace growth is seen as a global success story, but there’s one key to continued success that may be unknown and under-utilized: the connection between your company’s brand and the individual personal brands of your employees.

What does this mean? Think about it. Everyone who works for your company is a "marketer" for your brand. Everywhere they go, they represent you, even if they aren’t part of your sales or marketing department. Through them, your customers and the public develop impressions about your company’s brand.

This is because a company’s brand positioning is the way you want your customers to perceive, think, and feel about your brand versus competition.

Those perceptions, thoughts, and feelings are created with every single brand interaction, consciously or unconsciously.

So your company’s brand already has a positioning, whether or not you have given it any thought. Customers could be perceiving, thinking, and feeling about your brand right now in ways that you don’t want.

How do you make sure your customers perceive, think, and feel about your brand the way you want? There are many options, but one critical way is to make what I call the “Corporate Brand/Personal Brand Connection™.”

To do that, you employees must be crystal clear about your desired company brand message in order to communicate it daily to existing and potential customers.

Create a Marketing Mindset

Have you heard of the system that Horst Schulze put into place when he was COO of the Ritz-Carlton Hotels? First, he and his team developed a credo: "Creating memorable experiences for customers."

Every single member of the Ritz-Carlton staff – from hotel managers to bellmen to electricians – carried this credo on a business card in their pockets at all times.

To bring this credo to life, Schulze authorized and empowered his employees to spend up to $2,000 per customer to keep any hotel guest happy (within moral and ethical boundaries, of course!)

Here’s a true story about the impact of this “marketing mindset.” A businessman checked out of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Atlanta, Georgia and headed to the airport. Upon arrival, however, he discovered that he had forgotten his laptop.

Panicked, he called the hotel and spoke to a woman in housekeeping, asking her to check his room for the laptop. Sure enough, he had left it at the hotel! He informed the housekeeper that he was flying to Honolulu, Hawaii to speak at a conference the next day and stressed that he urgently needed her to ship the laptop to him by overnight courier.

The next morning, the businessman paced nervously in his Honolulu hotel room, hoping that his laptop would arrive in time, when there came a knock on his door. He opened it - and there stood the housekeeper from the Atlanta Ritz-Carlton, carrying his laptop! “I couldn’t take a chance it wouldn’t get to you on time,” she said.

Horst Schulz was clear about what the Ritz-Carlton brand stood for, and he empowered his employees to embody that brand. You may not be able to authorize spending $2,000 to keep every customer happy, but you can instill a marketing mindset in your employees and make sure they know exactly what to say and how to act to communicate your company brand to others.

How would you sum up your company’s positioning in a single statement and make sure that every employee knows that statement by heart? That’s the kind of practice that helps to build a strong Corporate Brand/Personal Brand Connection, increase job satisfaction, and ultimately grow your business.