You Have One Brand
Dear Erin,
You certainly don’t want to hear me vent about my daily mishaps all the time, but this one is worth mentioning. My little adventure underscores something that seems so obvious, but seems to be forgotten out in the real world.
You have ONE BRAND.
You don’t have one for your clients, one for your employees; one for your donors and one for those you serve. You don’t get to segment your stakeholders into groups and then decide who sees what. Once you put something out there, it’s out there.
ONE BRAND. Once you post something on social media, everyone sees it. Your website design must appeal to everyone. Your logo, copy, tagline, internal and external communications… it all is of a piece.
So what brought this on, you wonder?
Let’s leave the name of my vendor out of it. Suffice it to say that we are paying a professional services firm a good deal of money to do some very specific, important work for us. They are incredibly behind on the project due to staffing issues, I believe. I don’t actually know, because their client communication leaves a bit to be desired. But I do know that the project team leader left unexpectedly, a junior team member was left to fill in, and the work is now weeks past due.
Last Thursday afternoon at 4:45 - oh and let me mention I suspect that they don’t work on Fridays - I received an email requesting a bunch of information and a meeting at my earliest convenience. The information gathering session was back in December, so this is an unusually timed request and will take me hours to fulfill during a time when I have no resources budgeted for this kind of work. It also suggests that the project team hasn’t actually been working on my project like I thought they were, otherwise this pretty routine request would have come to me weeks ago. It’s all very frustrating and I would have appreciated at least some “sorry, but…” or some other recognition that I had just been dumped on because of their internal issues.
I responded immediately with some meeting times and a promise to get the info just as soon as I can. Needless to say, I did’t hear back either Thursday or Friday.
Here’s what put me over the edge: on Friday, whoever manages their corporate Instagram account posted a story of a staff-wide wine-tasting event from Thursday night. Wine Tasting. I went ballistic.
So, dude, 15 minutes before you head over to enjoy some wine with your colleagues, you emailed me a massive, 8-week late info request that is going to take me hours to complete, alongside a demand for a meeting that we should have had in December and then left it there? And then your company is publicizing how much fun you all are having together drinking wine??? A professional services firm with sketchy customer service which is behind on its client engagements is publicly celebrating the wine tasting it hosted for its team members?
Oh boy.
Here’s the thing. I get it. They need people. They want to put themselves out there as a fun, cool place to work so as to attract new hires in a tough job market. I understand. But you have ONE BRAND. Did you not think the clients who are frustrated with you are also going to see the “look how laid back and fun we are” Instagram post that you are directing towards your new recruits?!?
You have ONE BRAND. We struggle with this ourselves, because sometimes we want to look one way to the youth we serve and a different way to the donors who support us. But no can do. You have to thread the needle, understanding that everything you put out into the universe can be seen by every one of your stakeholders, regardless of segment. If you lean too far in any direction, favoring one segment over another, you are taking a huge risk.
Be yourself, be authentic but also be real. Know who you are talking to and be aware of your audience ALL. THE. TIME.
I gotta go. Gotta jump on that info request. Maybe I’ll pour myself a glass of wine while I’m at it.
Love, Mom
