Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #420342 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 300 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In a business environment increasingly dominated by brand awareness and customer service, how do organisations ensure that the brand they have spent millions creating is reinforced at every step of the customer relationship? Unlike many business tomes that focus on economic models or business school theories, Brand Mannersrecommends that organisations create a close relationship between corporate strategy--tactical business decisions--and branding--the way that your company's people deal with each other, with partners and with customers. It's a deceptively simple idea, and the book's arguments are complex, though accessibly written. Pringle and Gordon take a step-by-step approach to ensuring that people '"live the brand"--in other words, act in a manner that reinforces the values that marketing has led the customers to expect. The book's ideas are brought to life through a series of persuasive case histories, including that of UK supermarket chain Tesco, which has seen profits increase by 70% to £955 million last year. This kind of result, the book argues, is a result of consistent marketing, staff training, customer service and investment in new services within the same brand.

The fact that many of the case histories featured here are well covered in the business press--Tesco, Virgin, Orange--shows perhaps how few companies have really succeeded in creating an holistic brand. And matters are getting worse, the book reports. While companies have seized upon the opportunity to use Internet technology to cut costs, many have lost the ability to present their brand effectively. In call centres, for example, staff are twice as likely as the rest of the organisation to suffer serious psychiatric problems--with obvious implications for customer service. This is where the book's many charts, hit lists and the later chapters' summarised action points come into their own. Brand Mannerswon't enable you to create a brand from scratch, but it might just help to protect and revive the one you already have. --Sally Whittle

Long Range Planning, Vol.34 2001
"...plenty of useful practical advice..."

Review
"...enlightening and inspiring..." (Public Relations Quarterly, Winter 2001)

Customer Reviews

Great structure for understanding your brand
Modern, thoughtful, creative and insightful. How will that do for a start? Pringle and Gordon provide an agreeable ramble through today's brandscape using a double page spread as the map. The spine (brand manners") links customers (left page) to employees (right) on four dimensions: spiritual (yes honestly!), political, emotional and rational. Few firms overtly marry their external and internal branding efforts and this is a valuable reminder of the need to do it and a new approach to how.

Topical, relevant case studies round out a book which deserves to be doing as well as the Amazon sales rank indicates. Buy one today.

Brand Storming
Recent trends towards customer-centricity are all very well, but what happens when an organisation's people are not engaged in this process? You can have all the customer service personnel you want, but if they are not happy to be doing their job, the customer is unlikely to be inspired by, and more importantly loyal to the experience ...

The idea behind this book is a great one - the hook for me being it's relevance to people at all levels and in all areas of business.

By acknowledging that there are more than just rational forces at large in the workplace, this book illustrates the importance of fulfilling people emotionally and politically so that they in turn do the same for their company - giving you the eponymous 'Brand Manners' which build a good company into a formidable brand.

brands, demytholigised, February 11, 2001
Reviewer: Dr David Frankel from London

At last, the idea that a brand is an organic and potent means not only in competitive warfare but in securing the affections and loyalties of human talent. As more and more workers work for multiple 'employers', so a recognition of the values and uniqueness of the workplace of the moment becomes urgent, even essential. Gordon and Pringle cleverly make the jump between BRAND as external tool and as a bonding mechanism for employees, alliances and customers. Brands create communities, and, in an increasingly depersonalised world, the ability for brand to anchor meaninful dialogue and community has never been more essential.

The book wittily explains that brands have to be organic to take changing opportunity, environment and ever smarter customers/workers into account. For this reason, getting the brand 'right' is less important than keeping the brand contemporary and ahead of the pack. Being surpriseful (as much as strategically well-focused) is a theme of the book.

Most 'brand' texts view brand as a subset of marketing and product-positioning. Brand manners, however, takes a wider view where brand and culture/identity meet, and behaviour stems from that interface. It's marketing meets human-capital. I also liked the fact that old and new economy get equal attention rather than the unrealistic tilting to the latter.

Adroitly written, great cartoons, and unexpected case-studies. This makes Brand Manners a good book for a long plane-journey (I read mine when snowed up at Boston airport). It will be fascinating to see if Accenture (William Gordon is a VP there) will take Brand Manners to their heart as a guide to what their brand new brand can and might be.