ChasNote

My friend Alex Frankel is out with his second book, Punching In. (His first, Word Craft, is also worth a read, if you’re interested in how products get named.)

In Punching In, Frankel joins on with the “brand armies” — the platoons of rank and file front-end staffers — at UPS, Starbucks, Gap and Apple Stores to better understand how brands express themselves through the uniforms, trained behaviors and scripted speech of their entry-level employees. From the introduction:

“The new ‘retail environments’ and ’store experiences’ that increasingly surround us and draw us into daily interactions demand more of workers than the mechanical work that [19th Century industrial theorist Frederick Winslow] Taylor studied to develop theories on work efficiency…. Beyond studying workers’ movements, some companies had come to study their minds, to find better ways to win them over, to make them believers.”

For brands like Starbucks to capture the premiums they charge, they need their retail employees to convince us that the premium is worth it; service brands need to start their brand marketing efforts right there in the HR department.