Here’s an idea for a low-budget branding program. Take a digital video camera to a soccer field and let it roll as an athlete plays around with a soccer ball. Upload the assiduously amateurish clip free on YouTube. Watch consumers by the millions view it and share it with friends. Of course, it helps if you’re Nike and have a ten-year endorsement contract with the best soccer player in the galaxy to feature in your videos. Nike’s spot of Ronaldinho repeatedly kicking a soccer ball with breathtaking precision at the crossbar so that it comes right back to him has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times. Video-sharing sites such as YouTube are taking off with an amazing 40 million watched videos daily. Most of the video clips are consumer generated. But, smart marketers like Nike are tapping into the craze with videos that have a raw unpolished feel. While Adidas is shelling out $200 million as the official sponsor of The Soccer World Cup in Germany, Nike is taking a viral approach that is destined to pay off.

A new study from the Consumer Electronics Association indicates that there are many more women gamers in the 25-34 demographic than males, largely because of the popularity of the casual games market, with card games like solitaire (pictured) and puzzle games like Tetris. Meanwhile, legions of elementary school kids are busy supporting families, balancing their check books, finding jobs and getting lives - all by playing SIMS.

Clearly, gaming has finally come of age as a mainstream form of entertainment. However, most people go from a Jetsons home to a Flintstones workplace each day. The frontline ambassadors of most leading brands receive their training and communications on how to represent the brand via faceless, formal, one-way, artificially objective decrees from the top.
If your seven year-old child can learn to fly an airplane or build a profitable entertainment park with a video game, why couldn’t the same kind of engaging technology be used to teach your sales staff to sell consultatively and understand their clients’ business? If 24 million Americans are carrying their iPods everywhere they go, why can’t they listen and learn more about their jobs through those devices? If the average American is spending 40 minutes of work time a day reading blogs (as one recent study suggests), why can’t they use that time to blog about work-related issues with their colleagues?

The brand experience starts and ends with people. It’s the people on the phone and in the store who are the voice and the face of the brand. In many respects, training and internal communications to improve brand performance are the last frontiers for organizational improvement. For a function that’s largely responsible for customer-interface performance, it has received remarkably little executive attention or investment. The emerging phenomena of blogging, podcasting and game-based simulations might just be the engines required to drive a consistent brand delivery across all human touch points.

Building a great brand has little to do with traditional marketing communications activities. Instead, it’s all about turning customers into “Promoters.” That’s the message in loyalty guru Fred Reichheld’s new book, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. The director emeritus of Bain & Company has completed an extensive study, which concludes that the best predictor of top-line growth can be summed up in one simple question: “Would you recommend this company to a friend?”

Reichheld argues that customer satisfaction and retention studies are overrated. Instead, his findings point to a simple new approach to customer research: blunt as it may seem, just ask them if they would recommend your company to a friend. Next, segment customers into promoters, the passively satisfied, and detractors. This keeps customer surveys simple enough to be reported in a timely matter to the front line. The value of evangelical customers is rarely disputed, yet there’s a lack of commitment behind the rhetoric. Instead of measuring and managing promoters, managers get mired in complex customer satisfaction research that’s rarely even shared with the employees in the trenches who can really make a difference. These research programs are “usually complex loyalty indexes based on dozens of proprietary questions and weighted with a black box scaling function, designed to generate more business for survey firms,” says Reichheld. “Contrast that scenario with one in which a manager presents employees with numbers from the previous week showing percentages and names of branch office customers who are promoters, passively satisfied, and detractors, and then issues the charge to produce more promoters and fewer detractors.” Reichheld advocates that the “net promoter” number - the percentage of promoters minus detractors - can be made transparent to front-line employees, creating a line of sight from the executive suites to the front lines.

I interviewed Reichheld via email and asked him if real-time communication of the net promoter score would really be enough to improve performance? Reichheld admits that more needs to happen to focus front-line employees on improving the customer experience and encouraging customer evangelism: “Selective hiring, orientation, training, recognition, rewards, promotion, and outplacement are vital components. One important ingredient is the linking of promotion and bonuses to the net promoter score at the individual and small-team level.”

Would you agree that this is what brand and corporate communications leadership is all about, measure, communicate and hold frontline employees accountable for their net promoter score?