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360 Ways to Upset Your Customers: Ing Direct’s Brand Goof

Ing Direct Merger and New Disgusting Logo

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

—ELLEN GLASGOW

The average person is growing more sophisticated in its sensitivity and connection to brands. This can either work in a company’s favor, or not, especially in the era of social media.

Today, I learned that my online savings account Ing Direct merged with credit card company CapitalOne. Gone will be the hip orange brand with its happy bouncing ball and overall inviting feel. In its place will be yet another inexplicably uninspired logo mashup, probably the result of boardroom egos that overlooked the power and success of a brand that was able to make saving money seem fun. Red, white and blue isn’t exactly a step forward. And few people, if any, like credit card companies, which is why the visual brand is even more important in a case like this.

CapitalOne has owned Ing Direct for more than a year. But most of us only found out today via a reactive instead of proactive email. That mistake caused an even greater backlash because it broke down trust. People feel duped.

Retaining the visual strength of the brand or developing one that resembled the spirit of the original might have eased concerns. Witness the blowup on the Ing Direct Facebook page.

But why the hubbub over the color orange or a thoughtless name change, you ask? Isn’t that a superficial detail?

Because that’s how we humans are. We have a need to connect to the companies we do business with. We expect businesses to know us. We bought into a hip savings brand with a certain look and feel. A brand is not just the amount of time it takes to reply to a customer service email. It’s not how easily the website functions. A brand is more than that.

The devil is in the details. It’s not always easy to know which details are bedeviled, which is why there should be a thoughtful person asking the right questions. Someone should have had the curiosity and sensitivity to remember what brought customers there in the first place. That would have resulted in a name not associated with people’s fears (credit card company) and visual image that fit the spirit of the original Ing Direct. Change is good but even non designers know that the arc/swoosh logo is, well, very yesterday. People are saving for tomorrow.

It Takes a Real Voice to Give Customers a Voice

Elvis at the mic

Knowing how your customers feel about you benefits you just as much as it does them (assuming you actually make improvements to fit their needs).

You can use that feedback to improve services, promote the results you offer and sharpen your marketing message. But it can also build good will…or not.

The key is being and sounding authentic — actually caring whether someone had a good experience dealing with you.

Recently, I had just such an experience with Voicebox, a karaoke place with personal party rooms. The day after a group of us celebrated a friend’s birthday, I received an email saying I rocked (I like to think I did.) and thanked me for bringing my party there. They like to reward employees for a job well done and asked if I’d like to comment. For an added touch, they included our playlist.

On the other hand, there are companies — whose products I use and like — that send surveys I’m initially happy to fill out, only to feel several pages in that I’m working too hard. The surveys smack of statistic gathering, and worse, a veiled attempt to tell me how great they are given the bias of the questions.

That’s when I quit these surveys and leave feeling worse about the company than I did before.

Two requests for feedback. Two completely different ways of connecting.

Sounding and acting as if you really care is also a good way to share your brand voice through your values. For small companies who remain vexed about what a brand is and how to promote theirs, this is one such tool.

Rock on.

(Image: Kevin Dooley)

Your Values Writ Large

Soul Repair

When I was looking for a WordPress developer to partner with, I found several good people but ended up selecting someone who had a statement of values on his website. They happened to jive with mine so I hired him for a small project, and now we’re working together on a much larger one.

Not everyone does business this way. But many do. Many potential customers what to know what you stand for. Don’t be afraid to share your values. If they’re truly important to you, you’ll draw in the kind of people who you really want to work with.

This company delivers coffee, tea and food products for restaurants, cafes and institutions. Their values become their brand. But they go a step further than displaying their guiding principles; they tie each principle to tangible evidence, linking to specific pages on their website.

This kind of concise framework has an added benefit of keeping you on track and simplifying your efforts. The more clear you are on the core things, the less you have to talk about it.

Sticking to Your Guns Makes a Niche

many little niches in a wall

To some, specializing spells fear of too little work or boredom doing the same thing day in and day out. But specializing is more likely to equal success (however you define success). And, far from being bored, you’re able to dig deeper into the vastness of your chosen niche (or the niche that chooses you).

Think about it, when you’re covering so many bases, you only scratch the surface of any one area, whether it’s a medium, an industry, a specific audience or a service you offer. It would probably take a lifetime even to realize all that you wanted within a niche. Your skill level and wisdom would continue to increase, making you even more desirable.

When you leave yourself too open, you drain your energy and you risk having others categorize you. This leads to, among other things, referrals not worthy of the work you really want to do. Read more

A Fine Line Between Fluff, Storytelling and Dry Facts

running in a field of flowers

It’s refreshing to land on a website of a company that has clearly hired a good copywriter. The words have life. The phrases weave a story, paint a picture, create an aura. Someone thought words mattered enough, indeed, that they’d be the very thing to connect to the visitor.

That is until you can’t find a clear explanation of what the business does. You dig through the fluff not finding the information you need. You wonder if you’re stupid or if it was intentional on the part of the company or if someone didn’t care enough to make it easy on you.

There are businesses that deliberately create mystery and aura around a product or service just like the TV commercials that make you want to frolic in that field of flowers even if you don’t know what they’re advertising.

But it’s a rare business that can get away with that.

And advertising isn’t branding. Branding is meant for building long-term, trusting relationships.

Then there are websites that totally underestimate the value of delight. They rely on just the facts ma’am to describe the work they do, forgetting that people make decisions based on emotions first, then they follow up with rationale.

If I’m looking for an accountant, sure, I need someone to prepare my tax forms and inform me of any changes to the tax code. But I might first like to know the human side of her business, who she prefers to work with and why, why she’s decided to devote her life to crunching someone’s numbers and how she delights in taking the pain out of the most painful day of the year. That’s the kind of storytelling that distinguishes a ho-hum presentation from a humanizing one.

Caveat: that story shouldn’t be a fire hose of information limited to an about page, but instead, should appear in spirit throughout the website.

Delight doesn’t have to be knee-slapping funny or jaw-dropping beautiful. Delight can be as simple as showing that you understand the fears, aspirations, challenges or needs of the person visiting your site. You can do this through words, through the thoughtful way you organize information so it’s intuitive to find and through using labels your visitor would use and not your company’s internal jargon.

If you’re going to take someone on a frolic through a field of flowers, make sure they end up, continuously, at well-marked signposts that point them in the direction they need to go. And that means truly understanding what they came for.

(Image: lambertwm)