When it comes to developing Love Capital*, creating lovable brand characteristics* and Friend Framing* (*see previous posts for definitions), there’s one clarification I need to make before you get started.
Focus internally first.
All customers are important but some are more important than others.
Without doubt, your most important customers are your internal customers… your employees and suppliers… your internal friends. You already know that if you don’t attract and keep the best internal friends for a long time, there’s an extremely high intangible cost to your business and your brand. This cost normally manifests itself in the form of re-training, poor service, customer dissatisfaction, lost sales and unrealized potential. Sometimes we forget this critical maxim.
So we need to subordinate all external Love Capital efforts to our efforts within. Only when we’re treating our internal friends with the same consideration and compassion we’d normally extend to our dearest personal friends, will we be in a position to develop a brand with truly lovable characteristics for our external friends (customers, prospects and the community).
In order to develop your brand’s lovable characteristics, you’ll need a set of values for guidance. I believe the best frame of reference for this task is the concept of ‘friendship’.
You’ve heard the saying… “To have a friend, first you have to be one”. This clarifies everything! To have any chance of developing long term, mutually beneficial relationships with our employees, suppliers, customers and prospects, we need to treat them in the same manner we would treat a dear friend.
All we need to do when considering an existing or new brand characteristic is to ‘Friend Frame’ it. We need to ask ourselves the question… “Is this a characteristic I would want my customer to experience if that customer was a dear friend?”
Would I over-promise or bend the truth in any way? Never. Would I insist on a ‘no cash refund’ policy and only offer a store credit if my dear friend was not satisfied? Definitely not. Would I want to know if my dear friend was happy with their purchase? Definitely.
Can you see and feel the power of this ‘friend framing’ paradigm? It’s an extremely potent, all encompassing ‘true north’ concept for shaping a lovable brand.