How often have you heard a company say it plans to involve their customers? The love affair between ‘branding’ and ‘engagement’ seems to be the obsessive business story this year. Just Google the words ‘brand engagement’ and you’ll see.

But there is something very intriguing about a company saying it wants customers to ‘engage, debate and get involved’ in its turbulent times. I’m talking about Ford Motor Company, facing –and allowing us to see it all upfront– the turbulent winds of bankruptcy, rising fuel prices and tough competition whipping up a storm. The marketing Communication platform it has put together is at a web site called Ford Bold Moves which gives us an inside look at the challenges, using documentary-style video. “It is no secret that Ford is at the corossroads,” begins one piece. “Not only will we watch as the company struggles to transform itself, in whatever form that will take, but we’ll likely see other kinds of changes as well.”

This has to be one of the most daring moves from a major company in recent years. Some fifty episodes of these short films have been planned. The site has begun attracting all kinds of comments even before the main documentaries have begun appearing. They have been left unedited. One Mustang owner scolds the company saying he would never buy a Ford now. Another commends it saying it is about time the company spilled its guts and come out with this shock-and-awe technique.

Shock and awe, it portends. When the larger Bold Moves program was launched in May this year, the documentary was just one part of the mix, amid commercials, American Idol features, concert promotions, even a Bold Moves anthem. The latter all traditional branding stuff. This documentary approach looks like it’s going to make everything else irrelevant.

The intro video is a bit too well produced (by ad agency JWT), but it gives us a hint of what’s to come. “There is going to be stuff that people won’t want to have on camera,” says one person at the kickoff meeting, where the chairman vows to “rip off the BS.” Another executive says that Ford “does not have a marketing problem, it has a product problem.” Not often do you hear a company say something like that. But having tried every other kind of branding technique, Ford just might inject a new kind of brand appeal, um engagement.

Sometimes I find myself crafting messages that have no resemblance to the way people actually talk. When this happens, I have to redirect myself to a funny and insightful video I found.

The video is at www.nonbox.com. If you go to that site, there is a link on the left-hand navigation called “movies.” After you click on it, you will see a selection of short films. My favorite is “Garage Guys.” In “Garage Guys,” two middle-class American men are sitting in a garage drinking beer. The two are talking in language used in countless beer commercials.

After watching that video, I can go back to crafting messages that have meaning to my audiences.

When I was younger I worked in restaurants. Waited tables, bartended, and supervised a staff of 50+ waiters. Waiting, in particular, taught me a lot of lessons. For instance:

• the kitchen can kill your tip by botching an order;
• the host/hostess can kill your tip by double-seating you when you’re already “in the weeds”;
• the bartenders can kill your tip by taking too long to get your drink orders up;
• the lowly bus boy can help your tips or hurt them, depending on how you treat him;
• a difficult low-value customer can damage your ability to serve high-value customers;
• weak managers assure that even the smallest hurdles burn out of control;
• even the architect who designed the restaurant 10 years ago can cost you money; layout and setup are critical to your efficiency, and the 10 minutes an inefficient floorplan costs you in a shift can be the difference in 15-20 percent in tips by the end of the night.

All of this, in addition to the numerous things I was doing on my own to kill my tips…

Being young, confused and frequently angry, I thought I was learning lessons about how the world was out to ruin my life. It wasn’t until years later that I began to understand how my time in the restaurant industry had actually taught me lots of valuable lessons about marketing, organizational structure and behavior, operational efficiency, integration, and the critical branding role played by a company’s front line employees. As my good friend and former boss Anders Gronstedt has so effectively demonstrated, the people working across the customer touchpoints are the face of the brand.

So, viewed through the lens of 20 years professional experience, what lessons about brand was I really learning during my restaurant days?

Since I don’t want my inaugural post to get too long, I’ll post a lesson I learned now, and a few more over the coming days. Meanwhile, I’m glad to be here, and look forward to hearing your thoughts - positive and negative.

Lesson 1: Integration is critical.

Duh.

Unfortunately, very few of us are integrationists by nature. While we’re taught, as members of an individualistic culture, that we’re responsible for our own actions, etc., the truth in the business world is less about independence than it is interdependence. No man is an island. No woman, either. Somebody on the far end of the operation, somebody I may not deal with closely or directly, can exert a major impact on my ability to do my job, on the customer’s satisfaction, and on my compensation and reward structure.

To this end, it’s important for managers and leaders to know as much about the system in which we work as possible. Our plans, policies, strategies and tactical maneuvers have to be conceived and executed with an informed understanding of the whole.

With each passing day, I become more and more convinced that it’s impossible to talk about brand without also talking about the fundamental organizational issues that enable or hamstring the enterprise along its front lines.