Few things have as much effect on brand as the images a company uses in advertising and marketing. Or for that matter the images used in the corporate annual report, the company newsletter, website, etc.

The advent of digital photography has made it possible to literally move mountains or take 10 years off the CEO with the push of a couple of buttons. As a photographer, I find the new digital tools fantastic. Nothing goes out of our shop without some degree of digital enhancement. But I have watched with alarm as company after company has succumbed to the darkside of Photoshop®.

Just because it’s possible to clean up an oil spill on the factory floor or take out an ex-boardmember via computer, does that make it ethically acceptable? Or is the technology to blame for making it so darn easy? The fallout from getting caught misusing photo manipulation has wrecked long-term havoc on brands previously thought bulletproof.

But just where is the ethical line on photo manipulation where corporate communications is concerned? IMHO the answer lies in the INTENT, not in the amount of alteration. For example, using the same photo - even a slight alteration may be unacceptable if the intended audience is expecting hard news, whereas turning the sky purple and adding UFOs is admissible if the intended viewers know it’s an ad photo.

David Murray’s blog has some interesting comments.

What say you?

Suzanne Salvo

My mother had a saying, “Handsome is as handsome does.” However good you may look, it just doesn’t matter unless you behave properly. And here’s another one: Actions speak louder than words. What you, as a company, say and do is more important than a beautifully designed logo or a well crafted tagline.

In fact, taglines are pretty much useless unless, when applied internally, they rally the troupes. When I heard this yesterday at a talk by Daryl Travis of Brandtrust, I admit, I was taken aback. All those hours I’ve spent in my life fine tuning the perfect tagline…It just isn’t important.

Travis’ talk was about emotional branding (also the name of his book). His concept is based on recent brain research, and it’s fascinating beyond belief. I will try to do it justice with the briefest of summaries: Brands exist in the human mind. The mind contains countless memories which affect future behavior. When your brand promise comes into alignment with your customer’s mental model, then your customer will receive your brand message. You cannot alter the existing model, so you must make your message compatible with the model that’s already there, in your customer’s head.

The question we, as marketers, must ask is: How does our brand make the customer feel? This is critical, because brands are not about facts, they’re about feelings. We may think Wal-Mart is about price, but in fact, it’s successful because people feel Wal-Mart is the champion of the common man.

One more thing my mother always said: Tell the truth. If your brand promise doesn’t ring true–that is, if it doesn’t come into alignment with existing mental models–then you’re toast.

Just thought I’d share.

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?