Most brand managers spend an inordinate amount of their time and budgets on setting brand expectations, while neglecting the more important job of delivering a positive brand experience. Setting brand expectations is easy and sexy. It involves meetings with ad agencies, casting calls, photo shoots, and award banquets. Delivering on the brand expectations, on the other hand, is messy and hard. It involves arduous meetings with operations people, process mapping, training programs, and field visits. But, the payoffs can be huge.

Any brand manager who wants to get serious about managing the entire brand experience should start with the low hanging fruit: employee introduction and training. Most customer-facing employees don’t receive any training on how to represent the brand. What most companies call training focuses on product features, work procedures and compliance, all delivered to the fanfare of polished PowerPoints, soothing monotone of the training staff, and sterile canned speeches. The situation is so bad that many frontline managers are refusing to take their people off the job to do training.

With variability between high- and low-performing sales and service reps still greater than 50% in most organizations, field communication and training is green pasture for improvements Frontline brand training can deliver tremendous bang for the buck if it’s more engaging, more fun, more interactive and more like the computer games, blogs and Podcasts that people of the Pod generation are interacting with on their spare time. Evidence suggests that adults learn more in courses that incorporate such gaming elements as competitive scoring, increasingly difficult player level, and role playing.

Revamping the brand experience starts by identifying the performance expectations of customer-facing employees at each brand contact point. Next step is to develop opportunities for them to practice customer conversations at each step. Working in front of the computer, reps can watch video sequences of the customers played by professional actors, ask them questions about their needs, preferences and concerns, and watch video sequences of their responses. Using such online customer interaction simulations, reps get to practice asking the key qualifying questions to diagnose customer problems, prescribing a complete solution to meet these, responding to the most common customer concerns, and making condensed “elevator pitches” of their value proposition.

While simulations are formidable sand boxes for practicing new skills, blogs are emerging as powerful tools to facilitate real-time conversations in far-flung field organizations. The online logs are increasingly complemented with “podcasted” radio programs.

We’re at a unique juncture in history where we can use technology to provide our brand ambassadors with information when they need it where they need it, in context and on demand. The stakes and rewards are tremendous for any company that wants to reclaim control over how their field organization delivers the brand experience.

Harvard marketing professor Gerald Zaltman reminds us that we’ve learned more in the last 10 years about how the brain works, than in previous history. To unearth customer’s desires we need to use new tools to “mind the unconscious” of our customers. I’ll encourage anyone to read his latest book, “How Customers Think,” to get the full scope. Here’s a practical research tool we’ve found very effective in our client engagements: Instead of asking trite questions about what consumers think about the brand, ask customers what they think the brand thinks of them!

Zaltman recounts a study where consumers were asked what they thought of the brand Mercedes. Consumers gave the predictable positive responses, such as “good styling” and “comfort,” along with some negative responses. However, when the same consumers were asked what they thought Mercedes thinks of them, a number of negative answers surfaced. Customers made comments like “They don’t think of us,” “We’re sheep,” “They think we have money to burn,” “They think I’m a child that doesn’t know better.” By asking this question, researchers unearthed a number of negative connotations that sparked important insights. Such insights are rarely uncovered in traditional marketing and communication research, which tends to be confirmatory rather than exploratory; it’s conducted to prove a point rather than explore new insights and ideas. Zaltman urges marketers to question their questions. The process of framing new questions can expose a hidden wellspring of new insights.

Microsoft’s announcement to delay the launch of its long anticipated Windows Vista provides interesting lessons on how to manage brand communication in the “open source marketing era.” As soon as the news hit the street, everyone flocked to their favorite Microsoft backchannel blogger to get the inside scope. Robert Scoble has build a reputation as a trusted source inside of Microsoft. But this time, the Microsoft employee was caught off guard at a conference in Las Vegas. He read about the announcement in the news and his blog entry offers little insights into Microsoft’s decision.

Clearly, the rulebook of how to manage the brand message has been thrown out. Web 2.0 has wrestled control over the brand from the closed quarters of the marketing honchos to the community. Companies are grappling with how to manage the brand message at a time when employee bloggers have rendered the PR spinster less relevant. Clearly, employee blogers should not be used to break hard news, nor called upon to blindly promulgate the company line, which would hurt their credibility. But keeping them in the loop about big announcements can be helpful in integrating the brand message. What say you?