The Brand Is an Experience

If you have a business, you have a brand.

Think about the last restaurant you went back to. Not the best food you ever ate, but the place you actually returned to. What made you go back? If you are honest, the food is only part of the answer. It was how you were greeted, whether the table was ready, the weight of the menu in your hand, the light, the way the check arrived without you having to wave. You went back for an experience. The food was the excuse.

That is the point of this lesson, and it is the point our whole startup course builds toward. Your brand is everything people experience in regard to your business, and what they see is only part of it. That is the foundation you build everything else on.

Marketing material is bigger than you think

The book uses a restaurant to stretch the definition of marketing material, because it is a business most of us know from the customer’s side. Marketing material is everything from the sign you see on the way in to sometimes the building itself. It is what you notice when you look around the room. It is the training of the employees. It is the menu. Taken to its extreme, the food itself is marketing material, because as much as we like to think of the food as the product being sold, it is often the dining experience that is the true product. And the food is a big part of that.

It also includes the business card you grab on the way out, the take-out menu, and the mint. I do not want you obsessing over mints. I want you to see that far more things than most owners realize are shaping the customer’s judgment, and the bigger you get, the more the small details matter.

Here is the distinction. Most owners divide the business into “the work” and “the marketing.” The customer does not. To them, the invoice that arrived three weeks late is marketing. The crew member who tracked mud through the hallway is marketing. The voicemail box that was full is marketing. Everything that touches them is evidence, and evidence is the brand.

Walk through your own front door

In the second version of the chef’s story in my book, once the colors, logo, menu and cards were set, he did one more thing that most owners skip. He behaved like a customer. He walked through the front door, moved through the restaurant and asked whether the experience matched what the paper promised. The doors, the windows, the signage, the chairs, the napkins, the way a server was trained before being allowed near a table.

You can do exactly that for any business. Search for your company the way a stranger would and look at what comes up. Call your own number from a phone you do not normally use. Fill out your own contact form and time the response. Read your estimate as if you had never seen one. Stand where a customer stands when your crew pulls up. At every step ask the same question: does this feel like the brand I described in my vision, or does it feel like something else?

I see this constantly with service businesses: beautiful truck, excellent work, and a follow-up process that does not exist. The customer’s last experience of the brand is silence. Silence is marketing material too.

Consistency is what turns an experience into a brand

One good experience is a good day. A brand is when the customer knows, before they call, what the experience will be. That is why consistency matters more than any individual detail, and why the book says that every item having the same look and feel is what creates trust and brand recognition, which is at the core of creating demand.

The same is true of behavior. Your mission from earlier in this track is what makes the experience repeatable when you are not there. A customer who gets one experience from you and a different one from your employee has met two people, not a brand.

And remember the other half of the book’s warning: you can have the best customer service and a fantastic experience, but if you cannot reach people with your marketing material, there is nobody to serve. The experience and the message have to work together. One brings them in; the other decides whether they come back and who they tell.

This week

Map the experience from the customer’s side, from the first search to the final thank-you, with a line for each step. Then walk it yourself, or have someone who does not know your business walk it and report back. Mark every step where the experience is weaker than your look, or where nothing happens at all. Fix the last step first: how a customer hears from you after the job is done.

Mapping and walking it takes two or three hours and costs nothing. Fixing what you find ranges from free, a follow-up text and a cleaner voicemail greeting, to real money if the room, the vehicle or the process itself needs to change. Start with what costs nothing and touches the most customers.