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“The increased competition in services markets has made many companies realise that a strong service brand is an essential part of their competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the understanding of services branding has not kept pace with the growth in the services sector.”

— deChernatony et al. (2009)

About two years ago I was walking along the bottom road in Montego Bay (Gloucester Ave for the uninitiated) where I saw a young man struggling to erect a feather banner for a brand in the services sector. He was in the midst of at least 30 others in that beautiful park located on the site of the old hospital.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Branding,” he replied. “Branding. Getting people to know about the brand,” he continued. “Ah, so you seem to be a marketer?” I asked. “No. I do branding,” he replied. “Branding. You know what that is?” I thanked him and moved on, for I happened to know a bit about the brand behind his feather banner.

They are a well-known but small company in the Jamaican financial services sector. For whatever reason, they just remained stagnant over the years while many of their competitors had overtaken them. I also knew that they had recently hired a young (did I say, junior?) brand manager who was struggling with the financial controller for a proper budget.

The tenured finance director, paying lip service only, had never really considered brand management important to his company. Perhaps like so many others in his discipline, he needed to be reminded that brands are even more important for services than for goods, since consumers have no tangible attributes to assess the brand.

A service brand therefore has to be based on a clear competitive position which must be communicated and understood by staff who are capable of delivering the brand promise.

Conrad Free (1996) suggested (for free) that brand strategy for services must reflect a true competitive advantage, encompassing six factors.

This marketer’s experience is that the first on Free’s list is worth the price of gold. So what is first on Free’s list? He suggests that getting the unswerving commitment of the highest level of management is fundamental to the guarantee of excellent service brand delivery. This is axiomatic.

Indeed, we all know services brand managers in particular, who, unable to lean on the unwavering commitment of the highest level of management, have been starved of the resources that they need to execute an effective long-term brand strategy, and then are condemned as failures when sales results are not jumping off the charts in the short term.

Free then goes on to list five other success factors in services branding as follows:

o Vision: Everyone needs to understand and be committed to the brand vision.

o Results-driven: Vision should be translated into clearly defined goals for all staff.

o Competitiveness: The company should benchmark its performance against best practices both inside and outside the sector.

o Use of technology: This is a fundamental source of sustainable competitive advantage.

o Consumer focus: The customer needs to be regarded as central to everything the organisation does.

A worthy list. But in this marketer’s long experience, the one thing that was available to every successful services brand manager with whom he has worked was the full commitment of their CEO. That was the key. And without it, services brand managers were often at the mercy of aspiring or sometimes real power brokers.

Now if you will allow just one question as we close. In the 20 years since Free’s comments, has technology become less or more of a competitive advantage in light of falling costs and ease of access in 2016? What do you think?

Herman D Alvaranga is president of the Caribbean School of Sales Management. He may be contacted by E-mail at hdalvaranga@cssm.edu.jm