According to a Booz Allen-Wolff Olin study based on interviews with Europe’s Top 500 companies, 90% of these successful concerns are convinced that brand orientation is a key factor in their success. Ninety percent? I wonder if NA companies are that brand savvy.

Interesting factoid: Unlike NA, Senior management, not marketing departments, guide brand management in Europe’s most successful companies. Would that work in NA? Or is it already happening?

BMA (Business Marketing Association) sends out some great educational e-mail, but the one I just received made my stomach hurt. The inference was that we exist to supply the sales team with leads, and branding programs are just fluff. Here’s the quote:

The plain fact is that marketing teams who say they have a “metrics” problem really mean to say their marketing program isn’t generating sales leads. In the real world, this comes from running fluffy, branding-oriented marketing programs that don’t make a compelling case for the product to its prospect, and running these programs too long eventually causes the company’s sales team to complain that marketing programs aren’t generating sales leads for them.

Yes, lead generation is critical. But I’d like to see the sales team sell when their prospects have no clue about their company, their offering, their brand. And while it’s very difficult to demonstrate ROI on brand-building communications, there are metrics that apply. We need both lead-generation and brand-building communications in a healthy marketing mix.

But gads, is this quote heresy or what?

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?