Congratulations to our client Chestnut Hill Sound for winning Best of Show at MacWorld.

We all know the stories of Fed-Ex, Nordstrom, the Four Seasons, e-Bay, Google and Amazon. These companies used logistics software, data mining techniques and internet interfaces to create new businesses that in turn served new markets. These guys took a technology concept, applied it to a service idea and then did the hard work of execution. Their stories have become legend.

But there are countless small and medium-size service firms taking advantage of technology to build businesses, amass markets and establish brands too. These and their fortune 500 brethren are the companies of the service economy. Their ability to back up a service people want to use with innovative technology is their currency. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

But building a successful service business depends on so much more than simply making use of technology to provide a service. The experience of receiving the service itself is at the very core of the successful service company. And, of course, the ability to create the appropriate experience is crucial. For without this, you have a restaurant with bad food, a theme park with boring rides, an overnight delivery service with late deliveries, a phone company with dropped calls and a law firm that doesn’t win cases.

Services these days are comprised of two major components. The first is the technology enabling the service and second is the people who deliver it. Both of these must be in full working order. When they are, it is then possible to build a service brand.

A service brand is very different from a product brand and a bit more difficult to build because it is an intangible asset. The service is actually an experience, which of course includes the experience of finding the service, buying the service, receiving the service and paying for the service. And making it even more difficult, services don’t have packaging to help reinforce brand messages.

How do you achieve this? How do you make every customer touch point a positive one that reinforces the brand ideal? How do you train hundreds of people to express it? How do you build an environment that itself reflects the brand?

There are essentially four pillars required to build a successful service brand. They are: A well understood brand ideal or what I call getting to aha! If you don’t know where you’re going, no path will get you there. This is the “handle” or the positioning of your brand. The verbal expression of what you want and can become. Yet it isn’t necessarily a tagline. For example, McDonald’s has adopted a new brand ideal in recent years. The company is going for the “healthy fast food” market. The new tagline is “I’m lovin’ it.” The handle expresses the brand ideal and the tagline commercializes it. The process of getting to aha! is one of understanding what you want to be, what your core competency is and what the market for that competency is like. Then you can begin to mold and shape all three of these elements until you get to aha! When your brain says “aha!” you’re there.

Secondly, you need to create a culture that reinforces that ideal. There is nothing more important in building a service brand than building a culture where the employees (and the customers) are empowered to defend the brand. Service brands belong to the people delivering the service. If they don’t defend their ground at every intersection, the brand will take the path of least resistance and become something other than what its inventors intended. A highly functioning service brand culture squeezes out misfits on its own which helps to reinforce the culture building an even stronger brand.

Third, flawless execution is at the core of every successful brand. A service brand is the expression of the service at every customer touch point. And the key to creating an awesome service brand is the relentless pursuit of consistency in that expression. That means every single time a customer interacts with the service company in any way, the experience must be consistent with the brand ideal, or the intent of the service. If a theme park is to be “The Happiest Place on Earth,” then each and every time
a customer interacts with any part of that theme park, the “happiest place on Earth” message must be reinforced. That means vendors must smile, bathrooms must be clean, food must be frivolous, characters friendly, rides thrilling, people laughing and fun should be within arm’s length at all times. Each touch point is an opportunity to communicate the brand ideal to your customer. Every missed opportunity is a brand failure waiting to happen.

And finally, brand communication helps you get your brand messages out to your customers when they least expect it. Certainly advertising and PR play a role here, but great brand communication is a conversation. Great brand communicators have figured out how to make their brands part of a conversation within a community. It is interactive. It’s the process of making evangelists out of your customers. (See previous blog.)

Ultimately, a great service brand is about creating a great experience for your customers. Again and again and again and again. Building a service brand isn’t for everyone. But these days, if you’ve got a small or mid-size service business and you’re looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, think about building that brand. There’s no better way to increase your valuation. Just check out Starbucks, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Fed Ex, eBay, Four Seasons, Nordstrom, Whole Foods, iTunes, Sprint, Southwest Airlines, etc., etc., etc. And they said it couldn’t be done…

Check out CXO’s new ad in the November CEO edition of PR Week. In the same issue, Andy Cunningham gives some strategic advice in the article “From figurehead to thought leader” on page 28.

But what I’ve been seeing from your standard public relations agency lately is good old-fashioned press relations. I see a concerted effort to create publicity—cute contest ideas, publicity stunts, “news bureaus” and pitch calls. A lot of smile and dial.

What I do not see is a solid understanding of how this marketing/communication tool can be used to offer a competitive advantage to a company in today’s complicated communications environment. I don’t see an in-depth understanding of how the flow of information through trusted channels affects decision making. The issue here is that it used to be easy to get your arms around a trusted channel because it had a name, an address and an editorial director. It also had an operating strategy that was well known and incorporated a certain set of rules that both the “buyers” and the “sellers” lived by. Today’s trusted channels don’t have any of that. They are social networks that operate almost as living organisms and they overlap, operate in suspended animation and encompass the globe. There are no rules and no one is “in charge.”

Once upon a time, getting a “placement” in the New York Times would create a flurry of word of mouth and have a concrete effect on people’s buying decisions. The PR person’s job was relatively simple. PR pros built good relationships with reporters by sourcing information to them and often “scored” as a result. As journalism matured and evolved in the post-Watergate era, PR people learned how to adapt to a more difficult “placement” environment and learned how to influence the press by influencing their sources. But the press remained the cornerstone in a good public relations program.

Today, though, the PR job has expanded beyond pandering to journalists and influencing their sources. Today, PR professional have to understand people’s decision-making as a much more complex array of influences. Some are credible. Some are not. And it has become very difficult to tell the difference.

In this world, it’s public relations that must mature and evolve. PR professionals must become schooled in the complex array of influences on the public and come to understand how the flow of information through myriad channels affects decision making. They must also understand what factors induce trust in this environment. The PR job is a whole lot harder today.

Yet still I see PR agencies talking about pitch letters, news bureaus and publicity stunts to get the press interested in writing about their clients. Sure, they use the language: “blogs, pod casts and YouTube,” but they are clueless as to what to do with these developments. I’ve even heard them refer to these as “tools.” These are no more “tools” than the New York Times is a “tool” to be exploited at the hands of a publicity expert. They are channels of communication between and among social networks. They reveal access to communities. Nothing more. In this brave new world, it is up to the public relations profession to help companies reach their constituents. All of them. Not just the New York Times.

Looks to me like public relations still needs some redefining. Hmmmmm….

Our very own CEO, Andy Cunningham, is the Founder of the non-profit organization, ZeroOne, and is the Board Chairman of the upcoming festival in downtown San Jose.

After kicking off 2006 with exciting brand initiatives for clients including Gemini Mobile Technology, MarketTools and PRTM, CXO Communication is gearing up for a dynamic summer season.

The Collier Trophy is aviation’s most prestigious award, and is often referred to as the “Oscar” or the "Super Bowl" of aviation. Past recipients have included Orville Wright, Glenn Curtiss, Kelly Johnson, Scott Crossfield, Chuck Yeager, Neil Armstrong, John Glenn and Burt Rutan. Basically a who's who of aviation and space heroes.

From the moment we joined forces with Eclipse to nominate the company for this award in December of 2005, the journey was fast, furious and in the end -- incredibly exhilarating. Eclipse is a true innovator, and the Eclipse 500 jet is the ultimate disruptive technology. Being their partner for the past six years has been inspiring, and seeing them recognized and celebrated by the aviation, business and government elite was very cool.

Oh, and I got to wear a nice dress and get up on stage with dashing men in tuxes (thanks Vern and Andrew!) and stand next to a big gold trophy, which unfortunately is the closest I'll ever get to accepting an Oscar.

We are excited to work with these two new clients on their strategic communication initiatives.

• Gemini Mobile Technologies
• RSA Security

A friend at CXO asked me to write for this blog. I worked with many of CXO’s people in a former life. Back then, I spent lots of time studying technology companies and the ways they talked about themselves. It was my job and one of my favorite pastimes. I thought I knew some things about making technology brands stand out.

Then, my daughter happened.

She was a disruptive technology, my life’s tectonic market shift. Her arrival forced me to reexamine and revise everything, including myself. A neighbor had given me a book advocating an ideals-based approach to parenting. It asked, “How would you like your children to describe you?”

This question reminded me of one I often asked branding clients: “What do you want your customers to say about you?” The answers speak to what you value and to the kind of relationship you wish to have. The similarity of the questions made me wonder, could a branding exercise help me clarify who I wanted to be as a parent, just as it helped my clients define themselves in the marketplace?

It seemed worth a shot. I even got my husband to play along. (He recognized I was post-partum and probably crazy.) We debated and prioritized the values we wanted to impress upon our children. Once we agreed on what to shoot for, I worked out which behaviors were most important to model and to improve on. The list was daunting. For example, #3 was “Be Tolerant of Differences.” This required showing patience and restraint – sporadic virtues I was unlikely to master without mood-altering drugs. Clearly, #3 would have to be an aspirational component of my brand.

Regardless of my shortcomings, I resolved above all to be affectionate and caring but fairly hands-off with my children. I aspired to be dependable and to tackle problems with a sense of humor. And, of course, I knew my kids’ childhoods would be pockmarked by order and cleanliness. (Some brand attributes can’t be repressed.)

In the end, I chose to be called “mama.” It seemed quaint, suggesting a no-nonsense style that’s less indulgent than the style of a “mommy.” “Mama” isn’t the right style for everyone, but given my limitations, it’s the right style for me.

I had branded myself.

Turns out that was the easy part. Creating the Mama Brand was just expressing an ideal; fulfilling the ideal is very, very hard. My impatience quashes my capacity for humor at times. My habitual lateness erodes my brand’s dependability. Every now and then, I’m sorely reminded that every interaction I have with my kids changes their perceptions of my brand. A day’s worth of patience and devotion can be undone in one trying moment. A moment’s impatience and unkindness can take days to undo.

Thankfully, my kids’ impression of my brand is largely consistent with what I intended it to be. When I reflect on that, I feel immensely proud. If I reflect a bit longer, I get panicky. Can I really keep this up for the rest of my life?

Years ago, when my clients signed off on their branding platforms, I never fully appreciated how much work I was leaving behind. I didn’t realize how hard it was to live up to those lofty brand ideals every single moment of every single day.

Now I do. Call it just desserts.

I suppose my clients will just call it even.

Tein Atkerson is a part-time do-gooder with two astonishing children.