One of the most valuable lessons I learned from working with Anders Gronstedt of Gronstedt Group over the past several years is that the brand lives with the customer, not the brand group. Not to diminish to importance of traditional branding activities, but nothing that happens at corporate is as critical to the life of the brand as what happens across the various customer touchpoints. My call to customer service is the single most important factor in my understanding of your brand and is the single event that will determine what I tell my friends, family and co-workers about your company, products and services. If I was lured into trying your product or service by effective marketing on your part, then your failure to deliver might be interpreted as a betrayal, and the kind of word-of-mouth that drives is your worst nightmare.

Last weekend I tripped across an almost archetypal case study of what can happen when a business does everything right on the traditional branding front, but pays too little attention to the customer’s hands-on interaction with the brand.

My wife and I drove up to Raffaldini Vineyards in the heart of North Carolina’s emerging Yadkin Valley wine country for the winery’s Second Annual Italian Festival. Raffaldini is one of the more highly regarded winemakers in the valley (along with places like Westbend, Shelton, Ragapple Lassie, Windy Gap and RayLen), and for good reason. For a region that’s so young, these vineyards are producing some really outstanding wines, and within another decade I fully expect the best of them to be on a par with some of California’s top tier wine producers. Raffaldini’s offerings include several medal-winners, and I especially liked the Bella Misto, which reminded me a bit of an Italian primitivo, only with a little more attitude. (Note: I love wine and I buy wine, but I’m not an expert. Your mileage may vary.)

From a traditional branding perspective, Raffaldini is doing just about everything right. Their visual communication elements are clean and classic, and are wholly consistent with the positioning as an Italian heritage winery. (Since the region is so young, we’re seeing a lot of approaches being tested by various vineyards, both in terms of their product and branding.) Their Web site is crisp, professionally executed and absolutely packed with information. The casual surfer can get the gist quickly while the more interested explorer can dig for quite a while without getting bored. The copy never lets the reader lose sight of Raffaldini’s place with respect to the legacy of Italian winemaking, and the site features a mailing list, a wine club, a blog and other features designed to establish and build relationships with customers.

An on-site festival celebrating wine and Italia, then, provides an ideal opportunity to give those customers a better sense of the physical place where the wine comes from - and smart marketers understand the power of the “I’ve been there” factor in driving closer identification with a brand. This is especially true when the place is as stunning as the Raffladini vineyard is. The festival site was on a hill with an amazing panoramic view of the state’s western Piedmont region, and I found myself remarking that Ronda, NC was like the Tuscany of America. If you look at some of the photos on the site, you’ll see what I mean.

Raffaldini put some effort into making sure the event was well publicized. In addition to putting the word out via their own channels, they submitted an entry to Smitty’s Notes, an extremely popular Winston-Salem what’s up Web site/e-mailer (this is how we found out about it), and I was told they also did some broadcast in Charlotte, which is less than an hour straight down I-77.

Unfortunately, this is where things began to go wrong. The first sign that the staff wasn’t prepared for the response generated by their marketing efforts greeted us as at the gate. Admission included a Raffaldini wine glass - another nice touch - but already they were discussing whether they had enough glasses.

From here things got worse. According to one man I talked to, an avowed Raffaldini fan who was quite knowledgable about the region, the Second Annual Italian Festival seemed to have drawn about twice as many people as last year’s event. (Being victimized by the success of your own marketing is one of the most tragic things that can happen in business, isn’t it?) The most glaring planning failure was the food line - singular - which was extremely long and barely moving. Since the publicity noted that they’d have food, we showed up hungry, and when we stepped in line it was about 100 feet long. In the next 15 minutes, we moved a couple steps, and it was literally an hour and a half before we reached the front of the line. In a pretty hot sun.

It was bad enough that they had planned so poorly, but there was no apparent recognition of the problem - a good event staff should have quickly realized there was a problem and pulled more people into the tent to get the line moving, but nothing of the sort happened.

When we did get to the front of the line, we decided to order the “antipasto plate” (the grilled sausages looked better, but by now it was after 3:00 and we’d lost so much time that we just wanted to grab a quick bite to tide us over until dinner). This turned out to be a pretty basic deli cold cut offering consisting of ham, salami cheese, none of which paid much tribute to Italian culture. (Since my wife is second-generation Italian, I have come to appreciate what the term “antipasto plate” can mean in the right hands, but this was disappointing even by non-snob standards.)

The wine tasting tent was better, but even there I found myself standing for a couple extra minutes while some members of the staff milled around doing nothing in particular. Since I had just come from the food line, I was already in a bad mood, and while some of that’s on me, it’s a basic fact of human nature that a bad mood can snowball in a situation like this, and once you let bad planning set the tone things are likely to get worse instead of better.

I want to make clear that this entry isn’t intended as a bad review or a hit piece. Raffaldini is doing so much right. They have a great product, a breath-taking venue, smart marketing, and I’m told their success is enabling further expansion of their facilities - all of which is very good news. I’m rooting for them and all the other vineyards in the area as they work to create a new economy in a region hit hard by the collapse of the textile sector and other manufacturing industries, the campaign against tobacco and a series of painful corporate defections. With any luck at all, I’ll be able to attend Raffaldini’s Third Annual Italian Festival next year, and hopefully I’ll be stunned by the meticulous planning and execution of the event. If so, I’ll let you know.

This year’s event provided a valuable, if painful lesson, though - and not just for Raffaldini Vineyards. The sum of their branding activities and the strength of their product was sufficient to draw an unexpected number of people to their summer celebration of all things Italian, but if what I heard around me was any indication, a lot of those people walked away grumbling. I fear there’s some unhealthy viral making the rounds. I’ll be back, but am I the rule or the exception?

Key takeaway: what good is all the traditional branding success in the world if the end result is negative word-of-mouth resulting from a failure to deliver along key customer touchpoints?

I live in the North Carolina Piedmont Triad, a thriving little 12-county market that includes Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. Like most similar markets, there’s a keen interest in growth - for obvious reasons. And I’m fine with that - we’re all in favor of improved economic and cultural opportunities.

But sometimes I wonder what kind of pictures local leaders and developers have in their heads when they imagine how they’d like their city to be. The Triad Business Journal has a running poll inviting reader input on a rotating series of issues facing the market, and today’s question really jumped out at me:

What’s missing in the world of Triad retail?
In the past five years, the Triad has seen a retail explosion. Where previously you couldn’t find a PF Chang’s and you had to drive at least across town for a cup of Starbuck’s, you now have a much broader choice of coffee and dining options. But what’s still missing?

• Bass Pro Shops
• The Cheesecake Factory
• Ikea
• Nordstrom
• Saks Fifth Avenue
• Trader Joe’s
• Other
• Nothing. We already have enough retail options.

Results.

I voted for “other.” And I appended this comment, which I think is important for every city to think about:

What’s missing is local culture. This poll is wonderful if the assumption is that we want to be like every other homogenous suburban beltway exit in America. What you need to be asking is how we can differentiate ourselves.

I mean, I’m not dumb. I get that we’ve reached the unfortunate point in America where the presence of certain chain logos is taken as validation. If your fair city doesn’t even rate a Chili’s, well, how seriously should people take you?

I’ve been to some fantastic cities in my life. And while I dig Cheesecake Factory as much as the next guy (I love their Shepherd’s Pie), places are memorable because of how they’re different, not how they’re alike. You can’t go to a Wynkoop Brewing anywhere but Denver. I’m told they’re branching out a bit, but there’s nothing anywhere quite like a milk stout at John Harvard’s in Cambridge. I’ll always remember Santa Fe for a place called the Blue Corn Cafe (which may or may not still be there) and a green chili stew dish that was unlike anything I’d ever had before or have had since.

You can go to a Cheesecake Factory in a lot of towns, but the Triad is the only place in the nation where you can get by-god real barbecue. Stamey’s in Greensboro, Pig Pickin’s and Little Richard’s and Mr. Barbecue in Winston, and a host of places down the road in Lexington that are well worth the 20-minute drive. Best stuff in the world.

I guess it’s as American as apple pie to want to keep up with the Joneses, and legendary industries have been bulit on our desire to be individuals just like everybody else. But those charged with elevating the stature of smaller and mid-sized cities need to remember that they’re in the branding business, and nobody ever became special by setting out to be just like everybody else.

I attended a great show last night: Jeffrey Dean Foster & the Birds of Prey, with the legendary Mitch Easter opening for them. Free show, three blocks shut down, end of summer celebration, the whole nine yards. (More on the show, which was really wonderful, especially once the rain hit.)

Anyway, events like this always have plenty of sponsors. The local civic development sponsoring body has banners out, and three or four key corporate backers have their logos and messaging displayed prominently, according to the size of their financial investment. Pretty standard stuff.

Except that this time we were treated to one of the more baffling Whiskey Tango Foxtrot branding moments I think I’ve ever seen. One of the sponsors was Truliant Federal Credit Union, the fine institution where I do my banking, and one of the largest financial services institutions serving the market. They were one of three sponsors with their banners strung across the railing in front of the stage. Very visible, great placement, etc.

But the slogan they were flying. I don’t know who wrote it or what the hell they were thinking or how drunk the people who approved it were, but in big, bold letters it read:

WE’RE IN IT FOR THE MEMBER.

I don’t really have anything insightful to add here. Sorry.