On Friday, my day started off with a meeting with Craig Moodie, EMC Creative Director and six-time fiction book author, to discuss how we articulate the customer-facing EMC brand and the aspects of EMC’s brand as a place to work. (Note: Craig’s latest book is just hitting the market now – see it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Seaborn-CraigMoodie/dp/1596433906/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210628429&sr=1-2; http://moodiebooks.com/)
My day ended by reading a popular blog by EMCer Barry Burke, a.k.a., “The Storage Anarchist” on the power of strong brands and how they contribute to success in high tech. In it, Barry featured a business-school paper that Tom Broderick, fellow EMCer and product marketer, wrote in 2002 on “The Technology Brand.”
http://thestorageanarchist.typepad.com/weblog/2008/05/1003-maybe-it-r.html
The Customer Experience of a Brand
What I love about this paper: it brings to life the crazy world of survival in high tech. Last week I wrote about the importance of a company’s culture and of its leadership for your own career continuity. Tom’s paper puts this and more in the spotlight. If you’re in high tech, your heart will race a bit while reading it and you’ll likely shake your head, smile and say, “Yeah. I can relate to that.”
Tom writes about the benefit of a strong brand and how it can help companies ride the inevitable misstep or missed timing on a new product roll out. It made me recall a brand study we did just off the tech wreck and a subsequent string of EMC acquisitions in 2003. EMC’s entire offering to the market place was being re-shuffled reflecting new market dynamics and our own maturation as a company. To help us understand how our customers were receiving these changes we asked them,
“What does EMC’s brand stand for to you?”
The customers’ reply? “EMC is a promise keeper.”
How do you become seen as a promise keeper?
In my view, the culture -- the people and their values -- are behind everything a company does for its customers.
In my meeting with Creative Director Craig we were discussing some of the special elements that make up the EMC culture. The people of EMC, we noted, are “motivated, energetic, passionate, smart and ‘real.’ They put customers first and always, always set the bar at the ‘best’ in everything they do.”
"You. Energized."
Craig used this phrase, “You. Energized.” to describe what happens to people when they become part of EMC. I rather liked that.
- Life at EMC is “Championship Play” as a friend of mine, EMC EVP Frank Hauck, recently said. When every member of the team brings an “A game” every day – everyone’s game gets elevated.
- A member of our EMC family, a 24 year-old who recently “graduated” from our inside sales group to the field and who last year delivered $5.9 million in revenue against a $2.5 million quota shared this comment with me,
- “When I look at myself and the success I have accomplished since college and compare it with my college buddies I think, “It is a little bit of me and a whole lot of EMC.”
Magic Happens.
As I see it, when you take a smart, passionate person and put him/her into a soup with thousands of other smart, passionate people who set the bar at “success,” magic happens. By having a team that works in a no excuses fashion for this level of play (see Tom’s paper for further illustration) you inevitably get a pretty good track record with customers. And you get to stay in business a little longer than the rest.
2009 will mark our 30th year in business.
Talk back -----------------------
Have you lived the “Technology Brand?” Do you have a view on the connection between “Culture” and the “Customers’ Experience” with the brand?
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