Brand Butlers

Here is the theory behind the concept of so-called ‘Brand Butlers’: Customers are jaded, time poor and persistently disappointed with the service businesses that they interact with.

In part this is because service brands, for example financial services, almost deliberately over-promise how interested they are in their customers, what they can do for them and the things they can change.

The promises on the surface are almost absurd; Determined to be different; We live in your world; More give less take, all come readily to mind as the type of homilies that any mother might trot out at a play ground. But in truth they are almost impossible to deliver because they all rely on the hundreds of thousands of people fronting the business of banking to behave in the same way, which is, as any sociologist will tell you, impossible.

The solution to this is the idea of a Brand Butler – a tool that helps customers unlock the value of your business by representing your business to them, so that the concept of customer service by an individual is removed from the equation.

This theory isn’t new, in fact it’s been rattling around financial services for almost 30 years – since the arrival of the first ATM – something which so frightened the bank tellers of Australia that they stopped work for a few days in fear that their jobs were being replaced by machines.

The next big thing in Brand Butlers was going to be the internet – and to be honest that’s worked very well. The financial services companies that haven’t invested in this area have effectively invested in the concept of personal service over convenience and that’s been in all but a few exceptions somewhat of a failure.

It’s the next wave of Brand Butlers that is going to change the world and after decades of unfulfilled promises from the mobile phone platform – the arrival of the i-phone and the raft of fast followers like Samsung, Nokia and Android mean that maybe, just maybe – the future of brands is actually in the hands of consumers.

Coupled with this smart phone explosion is the arrival of always on technology which will mean that the role of your brand, what people want from you and how they interact with you will have changed forever.

The leaders in this space, as usual, are the banks and the credit card companies, which have rolled out Apps very quickly. But what Apple in particular have done is make the applications cheap and easy to develop which means that it’s not price but vision which is the barrier to getting to grips with the future.

But – I hear you ask – that’s OK for banking: What about superannuation and financial planning?

What indeed? Both are businesses models which rely on service and work best on service models that following the sale, take people out of the equation and put the basic tools in the hands of the clients.

What about all the applications that they must be developing to help their customers interact with them? Make it easy to get updates? Surely there must be a flood of applications being developed there.

The answer is – there isn’t, or at least none that we are aware of. And in a world where convenience and speed count for almost everything, that in itself is a pretty interesting development.