The Brand Who Cried Wolf: Deliver on Your Company's Promise and Create Customers for Life (Hardcover)

by Scott Deming (Author)
Key Phrases: ultimate customer experience, flawed service, sustainable brand, Red Cross, Lake Wobegon Effect, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
PRAISE FOR THE BRAND WHO CRIED "WOLF"

"Powerful brands command. Read this insightful book and allow Scott to share how to make your brand stand out and deliver you buckets of money!"
—Mark Victor Hansen, bestselling author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul(r) series

"Deming's approach to branding is not about gimmicks. It's about relationships-the real formula for building and sustaining your brand and your business."
—Rieva Lesonsky, Editorial Director, Entrepreneur magazine

"It doesn't matter what you sell. We're all selling service. Deming's book shows businesses of all sizes how to create incredible brand power through innovative service levels. The Brand Who Cried Wolf will not end up on your book shelf; it will stay in your briefcase or on your desk as a daily reference guide. If you want to grow your business, get this book!"
—John Valletta, President, Super 8 Motels

"Deming's revelations on creating an emotionally engaging experience between you and your customer are without equal!"
—Joel Bauer, bestselling coauthor of How to Persuade People Who Don't Want to Be Persuaded

"The Brand Who Cried Wolf explains how every customer interaction, large or small, impacts your brand's image and reputation. This is an easy-to-read book— veryone in your organization needs to own."
—Patrick Sweeney, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Succeed on Your Own Terms; cohost of the nationally syndicated radio show Winning in Business

"Deming delivers an essential message to businesses and delivers in a way you won't forget. You know the fairy tales, just adapt it to your unique brand: you!"
—Wayne Kandas, CFP and host of nationally syndicated Bloomberg Radio

"Stories sell, and that's what helps sell the ideas in this brilliant book. If you're in business-any business-you need this book. Get it now!"
—Robert G. Allen, bestselling coauthor of Cracking the Millionaire Code; CEO of The Enlightened Millionaire Institute

Chapter 8: Just Call Me Slick!

People Really Hate to be "Sold"

What We’ve Accomplished So Far

By now you know that branding is not exclusively about business identity in the form of a logo or advertising.  You might recognize the Nike brand from its iconic swoosh logo.  You might immediately think of McDonald’s when you think of fast food because McDonald’s commercials are ubiquitous, but by this point, you know that icons and awareness do not constitute a brand.

You also know that big businesses are not the only brands.  Your business does not have to be the size of GM, Microsoft, AOL Time Warner or Wal-Mart.  Your business could be run out of your home with you as the sole employee.  You could conduct business from a small office with a single assistant, or in a store with several employees.  The size, scope, and location of your business does not change the fact that it’s a brand, nor should any of these factors truly impact your brand if you’re focusing on one-on-one relationships.

Businesses are not the only brands, either.  Every individual is a brand, as are organizations from non-profits to political parties to social clubs.  For example, the Gates Foundation, the Red Cross, UNICEF, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Kiwanis Clubs, Rotary Clubs, Republican Party, and Democratic Party — all are brands.  The concept of branding I’ve been articulating is personal, which means everyone needs to develop one.

Each category — from individuals to organizations to businesses large and small — brings with it its own brand development challenges.  At the same time, however, these challenges are minimized when you understand your brand identity.  Throughout this book, I have written about creating unique and memorable experiences for your customers.   Chapter 2 defined a brand in terms of establishing relationships with your customers.  Chapter 3 distinguished between types of experiences you can generate for your customers, and differentiated a brand experience from ones that are merely transactional or simply meet customer expectations.  Chapter 4 highlighted the importance of changing your perspective to adopt your customer’s point of view, rather than emphasize your product or service.  Chapter 5 analyzed the results of changing your perspective.  Chapter 6 admonished you to avoid overstating your own worth.  Finally, Chapter 7 focused on the ripple effects of your actions.  Thus, most of the facets of branding I’ve been articulating since the beginning of this book have emphasized how you affect the customer’s perceptions.  In other words, I’ve been talking about the customer’s connection to your brand.  Now I’m going to talk about how you perceive your own brand, and about your connection to your own brand.

Creating An Authentic Brand Identity: Sincerity Can’t Be Faked!

First, you must take stock of your brand identity.  In the Introduction to this book I stated that everyone is a brand.  Everyone has a brand identity, but not everyone understands their own brand correctly, or even knows what it is.  You cannot develop an authentic, sincere brand without this understanding.  And you cannot create brand evangelists — people who trust you and praise your brand every chance they get — without an authentic, sincere brand.  You earn someone’s trust through your actions, so you’d better know how to act!

Understanding your brand identity, and developing the trust that turns your customers into evangelists, involves knowing what your own beliefs and values are.  The fact is, when you walk in your customer’s shoes, when you change your perspective to deliver the impossible, you’re reflecting a core element of your identity, your values, and your beliefs.  When you are sincere about trying to understand your customers’ needs, desires, and what they’d truly love from you, a genuine connection is made that is the foundation of trust between you and your customers.

Compassion and sincerity can’t be faked.  Branding is not a matter of putting on a persona that others will like.  It’s not playing a role, putting on a mask, or pretending — all that is superficial, a veneer that covers up the “real” you.  Moreover, a veneer can be quickly spotted.  I don’t think there’s anyone that hasn’t had the experience of being “sold.”  It’s uncomfortable precisely because it’s not authentic.  The experience simply feels hollow.  Think about the slick car salesman who’s “going to do what it takes to get you into this car!”  Maybe he’s heavy on the ‘hale fellow well met,’ demeanor, or drenches you with flattery.  When the time comes to make an offer on the car, he engages in an overly dramatic show of anxiety.  “I’m gonna see my manager right now and see if I can talk him into this one.  Between you and me, he’s having a bad day, but I’m really gonna work on him.”  Eventually, the long, drawn out ceremonial dance ends with you signing the lease or sale papers, but you walk away knowing the whole experience could have been different, and you dread the prospect of going through it again.

Why do you dread it?  What has soured you on going through the process again?  In a word: insincerity.  Insincerity is the wolf trotting around in sheep’s clothing pretending to be something he’s not.  When you experience a wolf in sheep’s clothing, you’re soured on future interactions.  It is this sort of insincerity that destroys a brand or prevents an authentic one from being established.

The car salesman example is cliché, just like the sales girl at the clothing store who tells you every single piece of clothing you try on looks so good!  Though they’re cliché for a reason, we tend to forget just what that reason is.  We instantly recognize the cliché, but not what made it true in the first place.

From the Inside Flap

If you're in the business of selling something—anything!—you need this book. The Brand Who Cried Wolf is the ultimate handbook for companies and individuals who want to establish and sustain their most powerful, successful brands. It presents a blueprint for turning typical customers into raving evangelists for life.

If you're looking for insider secrets or fancy tricks guaranteed to lure customers, you won't find them in here. Instead, The Brand Who Cried Wolf explains that great branding doesn't come from gimmicks or even from good advertising. Great branding begins and ends with exceptional, innovative customer service. Great companies are those that not only deliver on their promises to customers, but also transcend those promises to create one-of-a-kind emotional experiences.

Powerful branding doesn't come from creative advertising, or from a logo, color scheme, or theme song. It comes from doing for customers what you say you're going to do. Brands that don't deliver on their promises lose customers and generate catastrophic negative word-of-mouth. But brands that consistently exceed what they promise earn customers for life and generate waves of new customers from positive word-of-mouth. The art of branding really is that simple.

Using children's fairy tales to introduce each chapter and illustrate his point, Scott Deming offers a solid, simple, and highly effective plan for successful brand-building and customer interaction. Inside, you'll learn vital, basic truths about branding, including how to:

• Redefine your brand, and your company, to focus on the customer experience

• Ensure consistently positive customer interactions

• Create powerful, unique, and emotional experiences for customers

• Turn customers into your PR agents

• Make your brand the only solution, not just one of many choices for customers

• Use word-of-mouth to build your brand consistently

• Empower and inspire your employees to live the brand promise

• Grow your bottom line

Deming argues that the key to effective branding—and, in fact, good business itself—is focusing the business on creating and nurturing real, lifelong relationships based on customer loyalty. In each chapter, he tells a story that reveals this truth in greater detail, offering a real-world picture of what great branding is and does. Perfect for management, operations, sales, and marketers, The Brand Who Cried Wolf presents a blueprint for blockbuster customer service that creates customers for life.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (April 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470127120
• ISBN-13: 978-0470127124
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #485,415 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's fast, fun and most important very enlightening., April 30, 2007

By	FunnyBaldMan (Michigan) - See all my reviews

The Brand Who Cried Wolf is a phenomenal read! It's fast, fun and most important very enlightening. There's something here for everyone. There's new information, old information with a new twist and just some very funny stories. This book will make you look at yourself and your business in a very different way. I know I have. Highly recommended!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Your Father's Book on Branding ..., June 18, 2007

By	Joe from Buffalo "Joe from Buffalo" (Buffalo, NY) - See all my reviews

I'll admit that I was a bit skeptical when I first felt that the title of this book didn't sound grammatically correct to me (I'm the guy muttering "It's 15 items or FEWER" to my wife, every time we're near the express lane at the supermarket) - I thought that the right title should have been "The Brand THAT Cried Wolf." But, Deming quickly and convincingly explains that "The Brand" is more than an inanimate corporate symbol ... it's my company, it's my department, it's me ... and, thus, deserving of the "Who" in his title. Deming uses a pleasing blend of children's fables (which, I will admit, were enjoyable to get caught up on and, in some cases, to read for the very first time), business cases, hypothetical situations and personal experiences and anecdotes to put his principles into meaningful perspectives. I continually found myself playing a mental game of "Can You Top This" with Deming every time he gave examples of unique, emotional, memorable business experiences that caused him to become, as he would put it, a "Brand Evangelist." Likewise, I found myself playing the same game (probably with a little more fervor) whenever he gave his examples of such poor service that caused him to become a "Brand Antievangelist."

Coincidentally enough, just 2 days before reading this book, my family and I rented a movie that seems to be a perfect and real-life exemplification of Deming's "You-Are-Your-Brand" hypothesis: "The Pursuit of Happyness." Based upon a true story, it's about Chris Gardner, a down-on-his-luck salesman who can't buy a break, even after he is given the "opportunity" to compete against 19 other unpaid interns at a stock brokerage for 6 months for one permanent position. His successes started only after he began creating unique experiences for his prospects and clients rather than just those typically provided by such brokerages. His first big "splash" took awhile, but the ripples that resulted got him the business he needed to beat the other 19 and earn the job. (I wish that I had read this book first!)

Definitely a good, fast and worthwhile read. And definitely not you father's book on branding. And that, here, is a good thing.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy This Book.... NOW!, May 23, 2007

By	M. Francescutti (Clinton Township, MI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Wow! What a great book. It arrived this afternoon - never intended on finishing it this evening. After reading the first chapter, I was hooked. It's that good! This is the second book on branding I've read this month. The first was "Footnotes" by Kenneth Cole. That book, also excellent, shows the finished product. In "The Brand Who Cried Wolf", Deming shows you how to get there... and stay there. Whether you run a large corporation or a home based business, you will learn a great deal from this fun read. Just like Disney, Deming understand the power of a good story. Each of the ten chapters cleverly starts with a brief fable to illustrate a key point. Deming then follows up with countless up to date examples of how companies succeed, and more importantly, fail to achieve success in branding and customer satisfaction. Deming really hits the nail on the head with his comparison of Costco and Walmart.
This is a very well written book filled with stories to inspire. The type of writing that obviously comes from years of experience and a passion to help others. As Deming mentions in chapter eight, "you can't fake sincerity".
To sum it up - Don't think you need to be a business owner to buy this book. This is a great lesson of customer satisfaction and communication skills for anybody who interacts with others on a daily basis. Deming seems well versed in what it takes to form a successful relationship - both personal and business. I'm just glad he took the time to share some of his insightful stories with the rest of us.