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.

One of my favorite sources of consumer opinion is PlanetFeedback, a public clearing house for customer complaint letters. Occasionally, a customer sends a letter of complement to PlanetFeedback. I did a search for one of my favorite brands, Starbucks, and found that they had over 100 letters of complements! Over one hundred Starbucks customers have had a good enough experience that they took the time to log on to PlanetFeedback, open an account, and write about the positive brand experience for the world to read! And that’s not all. Anyone can write a comment to a letter, much like anyone can write a comment to this blog entry. Most of the comments to the complaint letters at PlanetFeedback are written by other customers who are blowing off steam about similar problems. Not in Starbucks’ case. Most of the customer complaint letters have comments by regular Starbucks employees who weigh in to defend their employer!

Take this letter about an inconsistency in Starbucks pricing: A customer argues that a Tall latte with a second shot of espresso is more expensive at the Starbucks in her airport than a Grande, which has two shots of espresso. Both comments to the letter starts with, “I work for Starbucks and…” One of them is by a part-time employee. They explain that this must be an isolated case at this particular airport location because the extra shot of espresso is not normally that expensive. How about that for devoted brand ambassadors? I don’t know if Starbucks has an organized program to mobilize its employees to defend the brand in online forums, or if it’s a spontaneous outpouring of support for a brand they love. All I know is that no other brand that I know of have as many complement letters on PlanetFeedback and no other brand is defended as tenaciously by its own employees.

Think about the brand you work for: Do you have customer evangelists writing about positive brand experiences at PlanetFeedback? Do you monitor complaints at these kinds of sites? Do you have an army of employee brand ambassadors ready to defend the brand or explain the situation when you get negative consumer generated stories?

My team conducted an impromptu mystery shopping study at consumer electronics stores in two states, and came back with some rather disturbing findings. We posed as customers who asked for assistance to buy a photo printer. No less than 80% of the reps we encountered didn’t ask a single qualifying question! And almost all of the 20% that asked something, asked just one question. Not a single rep asked such basic questions as, “How many pictures will you be printing?” or ”Are you using a PC to edit your photos?” Yet, all of these leading consumer electronics retailers are trying to stake out a brand reputation of superior customer experience and personalized shopping assistance. The responses from the sales reps ranged from, “I suppose you need a color printer,” to the rep who spouted product specs for 15 straight minutes without once taking a breath or even looking at the customer. What they all had in common was a complete lack of the most basic selling skill: the ability to listen to customer needs. With sales reps that are completely incapable of conducting a customer conversation, how can the nation’s leading consumer electronics retailers even begin to build a differentiated brand experience? And, from the manufacturers’ point of view, why don’t they take a sliver of their advertising budget and invest it in training retail reps how to effectively sell their brands?