Dmitry Linkov

Janelle Barlow in Moscow

March 19th, 2006. Published under General. No Comments.

On Wednesday I visited a conference with Janelle Barlow – Branded Customer Service.

The amount of people was something like 120-130. The conference was good, Janelle is a great speaker – she can work with people a lead them. Anyway Russian mentality was here once again and it was pretty hard to “make move” the biggest part of the audience.

The idea of the whole concept is pretty simple – you brand is made by your personnel and if there are problems on the finish line to the customer, all you efforts in establishing your brand were in vain.

It was interesting to hear that the problem of bad personnel education is relevant not only for Russia. In Russia there is a re-branding tendency – a lot of companies begin to think about brands and realise that they have only trademarks. So the first step they do is they go to design/branding agencies that develop a good corporate identity for them. But they do nothing with personnel. This is the easiest and maybe most expressive way – but is leaves the internal part of branding aside. There is no certain answer on the question “what do we need to do?” Change the way people think is hard. And it takes efforts and time.