I spend a lot of time on the road, so my travel experiences have become an endless source of branding article ideas. Here’s one of them:

A few months ago I was boarding the courtesy shuttle bus of one of the largest car rental companies in the country, when I sensed the smell of a lit up cigarette inside the bus. To my surprise, the driver was smoking. In a futile attempt to keep out the smoke he had his window half open, which was not letting out the smoke as much as it was letting the 40-degree outside temperature permeate inside the bus. Next to him a huge sign admonished, in menacing red letters: “No Smoking”.

Other people were getting on the bus, visibly annoyed by the cigarette smell while trying to load their heavy luggage, but our driver was too busy finishing his cigarette to help.

Companies spend billions of dollars trying to build their brand: expensive research is conducted to uncover the emotional connotations of their brand colors, cross-functional teams work for months to develop policies-and-procedures manuals the size of a large city’s phone book, marketing budgets the equivalent of a small country’s GDP are spent on Superbowl ads, among other things. However, all it takes is a schmuck in the low end of the value chain to completely ruin the brand experience.

As important as it is to communicate your brand attributes to your customers, it is crucial to communicate them clearly to your employees first, particularly to those who touch the customer on a daily basis. Your employees must internalize and embrace your brand values, and apply them in everything they do. Every activity, from answering the phone to packing a product to handling a customer complain, must be consistent with those values.

Your logo, your colors and your advertising make it easy for customers to remember you, but if you don’t deliver on your brand promise all your customers are going to remember is a bad experience, and that is worse than not being remembered at all. There are some companies that get it, and others that don’t. Which side are you on?

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