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Put Your HR Director on Your Brand Team.
Most arts organizations behave like brand management is the purview of the marketing department. This is only partly true. Marketers craft and communicate the brand promise, but it is the balance of the organization — especially the artistic and operations teams — that must fulfill that promise.
Brand promises are neither made nor kept by organizations. People do these things. An organization’s people strategies drive brand success. So, if an organization wants to build a powerful brand, its human resource strategies have to 1) be aligned with brand objectives and 2) support fulfillment of the brand promise. To succeed in brand promise fulfillment, organizations need the right people with the right attitudes behaving the right way. It sounds simple, but it’s not.
Savvy marketers build strong partnerships with their human resource counterparts to ensure that the people in the service-profit chain have the right temperament, skills, and training to be successful.
As I’ve thought about the challenges implicit in brand-promise fulfillment, it has occurred to me many times over the years that the hotel category offers many valuable lessons to those of us who work in performing arts administration.
Hotel brands are defined at least as much by the behavior and effectiveness of their people (service quality) as they are by room appointments, bed comfort, and location (product). The hotel business is a sector where good isn’t good enough. How can those of us in the arts sector learn from those who work in the hospitality sector? While we are different in some important ways, we are more alike than we are different, especially in customer service delivery.
A friend of mine, Natasha (a pseudonym), recently took a job as head of Human Resources at a Hilton Hotel here in the Washington metro area. In the course of a dinner conversation, I happened to mention that I recently had a week-long stay at the New York Hilton and Towers while I was at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference. She inquired how I felt about my experience at the hotel; how did I feel about the quality of service?
Because the New York Hilton is one of the very few hotels in New York that can accommodate big conferences that require large exhibit areas, this hotel experiences heavy traffic from a diversity of convention categories, including Arts Presenters — a mega-performing arts presenting and touring conference that attracts some 4,500 delegates from here and abroad. It is the largest performing arts marketplace in the world, and with its 1200 plus performance showcases, it is increasingly more like a giant performing arts festival than a convention.
Like many of my colleagues in this business, I have a long experience with this hotel. I’ve stayed there most years over the last twenty-one year period for as much as two weeks at a time. A 20-year experience arc is a reasonable foundation to evaluate a hotel property. Like most guests, my stays have run the gamut. Some years I’ve been in a renovated room and in some years I’ve endured rooms that even my sainted grandmother would consider dowdy. Some years I’ve been trapped in a room akin, sizewise, to a monastic cell. Other years, I have enjoyed the spacious luxury of the concierge floor.
Aside from my own experience, I’ve also listened to countless colleagues regale me with their tales of New York Hilton woe, from misplaced luggage to plodding elevator service, from gurgling toilets to sudden cold showers, from Scottish-castle-damp cold to a dry, overheated room that would wilt Lawrence of Arabia.
My experience — especially my most recent stay — stands in stark contrast to the claims of Dickensian conditions that some of my colleagues allege have been foisted upon them. I’ve had pretty terrific experiences at this hotel. I was particularly impressed by the woman who checked me in; they moved me from a 2-double-beds room to a single-king room upon arrival, fulfilling what is clearly an unreasonable request, especially in a hotel that is fully booked.
This is precisely what the Hilton brand is all about, fulfilling unreasonable requests to make guests happy. If it’s not unreasonable, then it’s not heroic. As a constant traveler, I can tell you that most good hospitality professionals have a strong hero streak in them. Their default answer to a guest request is almost always “yes.� If a staffer can’t say “yes,� they’ll almost always find some other way to satisfy or make it up to the traveler.
I’d hate to be in the hotel business, especially in a property that is capable of housing an entire small city like the New York Hilton. Frankly, I’m amazed that this hotel staff is as amiable and helpful as they seem to be, especially considering the daily barrage of indignant complaining and strident whining to which they are subjected.
This is why I so admire Natasha — a woman whose sweet temperament, easy sense of humor, empathetic soul, and keen intelligence have all been devoted to serving people who serve people in hotels. Among a plethora of other duties, she is charged with operationalizing the Hilton’s brand promise using her hotel’s most powerful brand channel: its staff. When you think about it, this is no small challenge.
Many of the people with whom she works are not paid all that much. Many are immigrants who can barely speak English, if any at all. Training these folks is challenging, given language barriers; imagine the difficulties inherent in building rapport and instilling trust.
These employees are expected to perform to strict service standards: punctuality, precision, friendliness (but not familiarity), politeness, helpfulness, etc.
Like the performing arts sector, there is a strong labor union presence in many of the larger hotel properties that sometimes makes HR management easier, and sometimes more challenging. Obviously, hotels employ legions of people. Lots of people equals lots of problems. Anyone who has worked with large teams knows that just one little HR problem can stretch ahead, time-wise, like a Saturday morning check-out line at Costco.
This calls to mind a former colleague of mine, the late Ken Brownell, who brought his hospitality-sector expertise to the Hult Center and, who, in my opinion, set the standard for what a performing arts center Patron Services Director ought to be, and what they need to know. Ken repeatedly emphasized that observable behaviors, more than anything else, communicate service excellence. Brand shows up in the little things.
One vivid little example came up during the conversation last evening. Natasha mentioned that hotel policy strictly forbids employees to carry cell phones while they are working. I asked why and Natasha explained that a guest who sees a hotel staff member talking on a cell phone sees someone who is unavailable to focus their full attention on guest needs. Excellent service is defined by attentiveness and responsiveness. The ring of a cell phone is the ring of a siren calling an employee to crash and founder on the rocks of bad service. I’d never really noticed or thought about it before, but I have never seen a hotel staff person talking on a cell phone.
Natasha understands, firsthand, what this policy requires of her staff. As the mother of a rambunctious and extremely curious young son, she talked about how emotionally difficult it is for her to disconnect - cellularly - from her son’s nanny. Knowing her little boy, I can imagine her dilemma; if there is danger to life and limb anywhere within a five-mile radius, he will find it and immediately commence exploration. It is so understandable that she wants to be immediately reachable in the event of one of his catastrophes. (He has a robin’s-egg blue cast on a broken leg and bumped head as I write.) But, the no-cell policy stands, maternal anxieties notwithstanding. As the HR director, Natasha sets an example. She walks the talk.
In this day and age where it seems that everyone feels entitled to yack at outrageous volume levels about every subject imaginable, this policy is not only sensible, it reflects penetrating clarity about how human behaviors manage evidence of qualitative service dimensions. Brands reflect organizational culture and organizational culture is comprised of many little behaviors that, taken together, communicate brand experience.
Ask yourself, “Who exerts significant influence in shaping organizational culture?� The people who craft the people strategies; the people who choose the people. Human Resources. A strong working relationship between Marketing and HR is vitally important to building and maintaining brand. Brand is an artifact of organizational culture.
So many CEOs and marketing executives think that brand management is all about logos, advertising, merchandising, messaging, and promotions. Yes, these things are important, but people who don’t follow the through-line from promise to fulfillment fail in building bulletproof brands.
If the growth of a human being is controlled by DNA, then the growth of a brand is controlled by the behavioral norms that shape organizational culture. When it comes to how a brand is experienced, what is behaviorally visible to customers drives perception. Customer perceptions will either underscore or obscure every impression or message that has come before, including your brand promise.
If you want a quick test of whether your Marketing-HR partnership is calibrated correctly, ask yourself if you know your HR director’s telephone extension. If you have to look it up, you have some work to do.
Posted on January 29, 2007 08:00 AM | Permalink
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Comments
While your first paragraph squarely aims this blog entry at arts organizations, what you're saying here is so universally and fundamentally true of all organizations -- delivering/fulfilling brand promise is the job of everyone in an organization.
To provide a viewpoint on a completely different sector, I have just been in a regional children's hospital for the past week with my youngest daughter, and throughout the week I took note of the various signs, posters, messages touting their apparently recently formed brand promise. It was supposedly a tightly integrated team and system like none other, aimed at delivering the best care and peace of mind to patients and their parents. For the entire week, however, on countless occasions, I found myself wondering 'who is training the staff about this brand promise, if at all?' The systems could not have been more terrible, and my child's care -- dependent on timely delivery of medicines and of the right food for a special diet -- was constantly put at risk by their bad systems.
And systems weren't the only culprit as I witnessed continual bad behavior, complaining, and totally off brand behavior by the staff (particularly the non-medical, service staff).
HR may in fact be THE most critical aspect of brand management for any organization. In my own small company of two offices and twelve people, I often believe that having hired good people helps my organization deliver on brand promise when our systems fail. Having both in good order, then, would of course be the ideal.
You've often brought up the point that too many people think of brand in too narrow terms... they think of it in design terms. I'm in the design industry myself and I couldn't agree with you more. Perhaps it's time, as you point out, to pull up another chair to the boardroom table for the HR thinker.
This is a very nice article which provides an insight into the role of HR in brand management. It really helped me in my paper presentation on the following topic. Thanks again