Internalization of the right kind!

If the Director of Marketing, Research in Motion does not carry a Blackberry or if he even carries another brand of handset in addition to a Blackberry, one would say that he has not internalized the very brand he is responsible for! I intently observe the salespersons especially in apparel retail stores whether they wear their own brand of apparel for work. I have observed the Tommy Hilfiger brand stores in India and each salesperson wears the brand for work. Brand retailers often ensure that the brand is totally internalized by the persons who deal with it so that customers may know how the brand stakeholders themselves value their own brand. Now there comes a silly doubt to my mind with regard to how customers of a high-end brand would perceive the salespeople wearing the same brand customers intend to buy. For example if a customer would walk into a Cartier store to buy and if the sales personnel sport a Cartier brand of watch each, my fear goes such that the customer may feel bad that he is buying a common product that everyone in the store is wearing. My take on internalization went through some turbulence. As I am writing this, I clarified this point with the head of retailing of a premium multi-brand watch retailing company sitting across the table with him in Bangalore, he told me that in an exclusive Omega boutique he runs in Mumbai, while the salespersons wear an entry level model, the store head wears a higher profile one. He says that customers only feel happy to be associated with a brand that is internalized by everyone who deals with it, giving a very clear message that they all know the product very well while feeling proud to wear the same brand. He added that when salespersons wear the brands the store sells, they become more confident and comfortable even in their body language and interact with customers in full throttled ease. The customers would also feel that the salespersons walk their talk too.

As salespersons internalize the brand when they themselves use it, there is another question that comes to my mind – the question of how they serve customers with an attitude that could befit the brand. If the service is excellent and if it is in perfect synchronization with the image of the brand they deal with, customers are bound to be extremely comfortable buying the brand. Brands often train salespersons on selling skills and customer service. Service techniques that are learnt and delivered run the risk of running into oblivion in practice over a period of time. Service may often come from the lip and not from the heart. Service personnel are sometimes trained to deliver service to customers with a few pre-determined steps. Consequently these personnel may tend to dramatize the scene, affecting to be extending the best service to customers. If such service is not from the heart, in the process, gaps may emanate. In a scenario where service is dramatized or histrionically styled, service gaps may widen. Service personnel are often trained to do a few things as a process to deliver the expected standards of service to customers, rather than they are coached to do it at their free will. Since the service delivery process is forced upon retail sales and service personnel, their natural behaviour may be temporarily suspended. This may give rise to a situation where they may put on an air of good service persons without the well-meaning intentions of genuinely serving the customers, with the right attitudes rising from within. When affectations are worn, the genuine logical coherence of the true service process may find its links missing in the completion of the service chain. While dramatizing the service delivery process the salesperson may also tend to overdo the enactment. Such an act may go to an extent where the customer may think that the person is too courteous abnormally. Service from the heart can only come through a facilitated means of helping salespeople internalize the required service standards and not by trying to train them with a few steps for following a process. My friend said that in his high-end multi-brand watch store it is the genuine service from the heart that helps customers buy. As the store personnel wear the store’s own brand of watches, they also behave and help customers in a manner that customers truly appreciate.

Internalized service never ceases with the completion of the sales transaction, but it builds the customers’ relationship with the brand for a long period of time, if not for a lifetime. If service intentions do not emanate from the heart naturally, then service is externalized. Internalization of service standards will flow from within the person, following the good culture imbibed and practiced for excellence. This is internalization of the right kind!

Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani