Sunday, October 19, 2008

Enjoy Your Living Experience

About a month ago I joined the other members of our executive team at the J.C. Hart Company for a retreat to discuss the "brand" of the company.  These "meetings of the minds" are always a great way to take a step back and really look to see if we are delivering on our purpose, vision, and goal as a company.  Since joining the company back in 2003, we've had 3 of these "executive retreats" and we've always come away with an improved vision for the company.

As I said, at this most recent retreat we wanted to review our "brand."  After going through a few exercises discussing our "touch points," watching the Fish! Philosophy video (the 5th time for me), sharing some good and bad customer service stories, and reviewing our company Core Values, we came to the conclusion we really like the direction we've taken the business.  However, we also concluded that the message or "brand statement" we share at our "touch points" just wasn't sticky enough.  While our Purpose is "We make your Home and enjoyable living experience," this doesn't just roll off the tongue in everyday conversation.  So we've taken our first step in improving the way this message is sent.  First, for marketing purposes we shortened our Purpose into a "brand statement":  Enjoy Your Living Experience.  It's a start, and our associates are excited about the message.  We've always been a management company that is known for customer service, but our goal is to take it to the next level.

But none of this is really why I'm writing this post.  Since rolling out "Enjoy Your Living Experience" I feel like customer service has become a hot topic for many others in the marketing world.  For Jay Ehret it's something he does everyday, but for Jeremiah Owyang it's not his usual expertise.  This is why I love following these guys and others on Twitter.  Not only do they share great blog posts, but they also make great observations and share them with the Twitter community.  Before Twitter and blogs we'd make business decisions and hope they took us in the right direction, now we can just do a Twitter or Google search and find out if another company has already tried our idea.  Better yet, we can write a blog post or tweet and get feedback on our idea from a plethora of experts.  By using these tools we can all make better business decisions and ideally become better businesses.  I certainly am enjoying my living experience since branching out into social media and I thank all of you that share with us your ideas, knowledge, and expertise.

Thanks for reading and enjoy your day.

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