Poor old NHS – they’ve gone and done it again.

The poor old NHS brand has taken a battering again:

Inquiry needed after shocking NHS failure

Mar 18 2009 Birmingham Post

“The Healthcare Commission’s report into Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust makes shocking reading. It paints a picture of services which would have disgraced a third world nation.”

I have great sympathy for the NHS in general. As a brand, I’m afraid it does not represent an homogeneous whole.  I used to work for regional health authorities before they were pretty well dismantled to form multiple trusts.  Working with these trusts soon demonstrated the variety of skills, resources and management from the amazingly good to the, frankly, appalling.

One of the most interesting features I came across while carrying out research for Trust branding exercises was the strange schizophrenia with which the public view the NHS – they criticise the service, but then say our doctors and nurses are wonderful. And in spite of the criticism still feel the service is the best in the world.

I had to be a drain on the NHS myself recently for a small operation and was really surprised by the quality of service, professionalism and ‘customer’ care. I have to say that the service hugely exceeded my expectations and it brought home to me the issues Tom Peters discussed in his views of ‘Excellence’ in customer service.  The first issue is that you can say all you want through your marcomms activity, but customer service has to be experienced.  Then excellence of service need to be constantly improving or else the level of service comes to be accepted as the norm.

Poor old NHS…  but you can’t help but think that there is some systemic issue here. I can’t imagine leading private sector organisations allowing there to be such varieaty in the quality of delivery across its operations, branches or subsidiaries.

Trimodal theory and brand interaction

I have long been interested in the the way we understand brands on two levels – the pragmatic or declarative knowledge level (accessible via high input cortical processing) and the emotional knowledge level (low input processing). These levels really deal with the epistemology and ontology of brands, but when we look at how we interact with brands in the real world, we see a trimodal model: we interact with brands on both pragmatic and emotional levels, but also on physical or physiological levels.

For example, when I am shopping for a product I am making conscious decisions about my brand choice based upon my declarative knowledge about the brand, underlying this is my emotional attachment or reaction to the brand, but I am also involved in a physical process, perhaps responding to the appearance or tactile experience of the product, or maybe interacting with the retail environment. Perhaps a classic example of this trimodal model in action is choosing a car – we have emotional, almost sub-conscious understanding of brand values, we analyse pragmatic knowledge about brand and product, then we engage in physical interaction which maybe supports or amends our ontological understanding.

Even working with intangible brands and services, such as financial services, there is a level of physiological level of interaction perhaps through a website or telephone sales, or face to face interactions with a representative or brand steward.

I will avoid the cliche of the Venn diagram this obviously suggests, however the interactions between these three dimensions are critical and fascinating – any brand manager or brand steward should consider each dimensions carefully, and be aware of their relative importance to the brand.

Choose your icons carefully

Two media items caught my eye and made me reflect upon the person as brand model (as opposed to the brand as person model). Some attributes, physical or acquired, become iconic. The physical ones we are usually stuck with the acquired ones are items of choice… or more likely we become prisoners of the associations, such as Churchill’s cigar, Castro’s beard, Maggie Tatcher’s handbag or Hank Marvin’s glasses. Unlike the rest of us, Castro can never look in the mirror and think, “Beards are a bit dated, think I’ll shave it off”.

The two media items were poles apart – the first was watching a clip of Ted Kennedy’s birthday bash and noting he still has the same iconic flowing hairstyle from the 1960’s, albeit a patrician silver now. The other was seeing Francis Rossi of Status Quo cut off the pony tail he has had from the same era. He reluctantly admitted to no longer having enough hair to make a decent pony tail.  I think his brand is probably well enough established to deal with this, but it may be a salutary notice to be sensitive of what brand assets you become associated with – whether you are a potential celebrity or a company.

Do brands need flexible friends?

Study: Brands Need Flexibility Adweek 09 Feb 2009.
“Sixty-three percent claimed traditional brand-positioning approaches don’t work as well as they did in the past. Why? Rapidly shifting media habits and the advent of new technologies require brands “to tell a bigger story,” said Verse Group managing partner Randall Ringer. “The brand-positioning model was designed for a world of 30-second commercials. It doesn’t work in the world of new media. It’s like a square wheel.”

Okay, for this US survey for Forrester, all respondents’ companies had revenues of $250 million or more, and we could argue that this is something smaller brands have know for some time.  Ask any agency or consultancy dealing with medium to large clients below this revenue slice and pressure to demonstrate improved ROI has been at the top of the agenda for quite some time.  Flexibility of approach has been in the blood of any brand communications organisation servicing this market – if it hasn’t been they have probably already disappeared.

I would caution against the danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, however.  Even though most of my work is in digital media, I don’t believe it is a case of, ‘New media good – traditional media bad’; there are tasks which manifestly traditional media can achieve better than digital media. ‘Flexibility’ means just that… and having an open mind to strategic planning.  And don’t assume traditional media is static: media owners also have the capability to be flexible, so keep a close eye on their responses to tumbling revenues.  This is maybe where some of the most exciting opportunities may present themselves.