Building a global brand: Lessons from FedEx – Part 1

Gabriel Cohen: Holly, I am so excited about the first episode of this new series. I cannot imagine a better first conversation to do our first interview together with today. We’re talking to Monica Skipper, who is the VP of Brand, Head of Brand Management at FedEx for over 20 years.

Holly Osborne: Amazing. Monica has probably the closest thing to an encyclopedic… like if you wanted to learn about brand, sit and talk to Monica, actually that’s the plan here, but she holds the keys to the core principles of branding. And when I have a struggle or a challenge or a question, she’s one of the first people that I would think to go to because she has seen every iteration of brand over her 20 year horizon there. It’s pretty impressive.

Gabriel: I mean, let’s just take a step back for a second, right? FedEx, created in 1971. It’s colossal. Everyone knows FedEx. 530,000 employees deliver 15 and a half million packages a year. How many other brands do we know that have their brand on 670 aircraft that aren’t one of the main airlines? They’re in 220 countries.

Everyone knows the iconic design of the FedEx logo where, you know, the hidden arrow between the E and the X, which symbolizes speed and precision.

Everyone knows the brand. So you’ve got to remember that it’s still a packaging/logistics/ops company, yet somehow brand is respected and at the forefront. Because how else could they justify having a FedEx racing team?

Holly: Yeah.

Gabriel: The huge golf sponsorship that they have, the Champions League sponsorship. Up until last year, you had FedEx Field in DC. So this is an organization that fundamentally believes in brands. So I’m so interested to hear from Monica, like how does that come to be?

Holly: Yeah, and also I want her to talk to us about how she keeps control of this. I mean, it’s just massive in scale, massive in reach. It’s a springboard brand, meaning anywhere in the world you say that term and it’s known.

But the other interesting thing too is she’s earned… with this brand they’ve earned verb status. You know you’re famous when somebody verbs you, when somebody FedExes or Ubers. Where they use the brand name in the action. Even if I’m sending it via DHL, let’s be honest, I’m going to tell someone… I don’t say I’m going to overnight it to you, I’m going to say I FedExed it to you.

I’m fascinated to find out how Monica manages control of this massive ecosystem and the fact that they’ve had to stay consistent through 20-30+ years of global change.

Gabriel: Huge acquisitions, I mean remember like Kinko’s.

Holly: Yeah. I remember that FedEx Kinko’s went up – changed my life for a few years. I think I lived at one during one particularly heavy project.

Gabriel: I have a colleague who worked with Monica in the past, about 10 years ago, who has nothing but amazing things to say about her. How did you meet her?

Holly: So Monica and I were in a group together called Brand 50. It’s part of the World 50 conglomerate. And Monica was super cool because she represented this beacon of a massive, like I said, springboard brand. Everybody wanted answers from Monica. And yet what was also particularly cool about Monica is that she was the first to discuss vulnerabilities, and she was the first to discuss real challenges.

And so she never handed you an answer that was polished and that was about shining a light on her successes. It was always about breaking it down and discussing the mistakes that had been made, the hard lessons learned, and then the outcome. And that’s what makes Monica one of the most interesting brand leaders, it’s that she is in constant growth and learning mindset, not just looking to sort of package up a great story for the sake of a case study.

I find her to be one of the most fascinating brand leaders and someone who’s an open book, who’s going to probably reveal some pretty interesting things to us. She’s wise. She’s courageous. That’s something I appreciate a lot about her, she’s got corporate courage and is not afraid to tell you when something didn’t work. She’d be the first to warn you off something as to send you in the right direction.

Gabriel: Wonderful. Well, without further ado, let’s listen and jump in and invite in our guest, Monica Skipper.

Holly: Let’s do it.

Gabriel: We are so excited today to welcome Monica Skipper to the show. Someone who is just going to give us an absolute wealth of knowledge after 20 years working at FedEx. And she has promised us that it’s going to be completely unfiltered. And we’re going to get all the great stories because now it doesn’t matter… It doesn’t matter because you’re not there anymore, so you can absolutely tell us everything, right Monica?

Monica Skipper: Most things, except I can’t disparage the company or they´d come after me.

Gabriel: Nor would we ever want to. It just allows us to talk about all those stories behind the hood.

I mean, maybe just quickly give us a bit of a background on how you kind of even got to FedEx. How you got into this brand management role.

Monica: It’s so funny because I’m one of few people who has a degree in marketing. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in marketing and I’ve worked in marketing my whole life. So I’m kind of the not the usual suspect.

I started out in database and direct marketing and just knew that I loved branding. I loved kind of the idea behind what makes people attracted to brands. And I was like, what’s the best brand in Memphis that I could work for? I was like FedEx.

And so I applied for a job and actually went to work doing database and direct marketing at FedEx, hoping that I could move into a brand role. I was fortunate enough that the brand director said, “Yeah, come, you can come work for me.” I made a few moves internally and got there.

She was a gem and had been at the company basically her whole career. She was the first director of branding at FedEx ever. And when she retired, I was fortunate enough to get her role and then moved up in the company.

When I retired, I had sponsorship, advertising, branding, then part of the time I had corporate reputation, corporate citizenship. Which really does go with brand if you think about it.

Gabriel: One of the things that we’re really excited about in this conversation is the fact that you were there for such a long time means that you went through so many changes and that your experience of brand at FedEx in many ways matches how branding as a discipline has evolved in the last 20 years.

Just before we started recording, we were talking about Designing Brand Identity, which is Alina Wheeler’s book, which is now in its sixth edition. And I think the brilliant thing about that book is that it’s also a great way to trace the evolution of brand. Because every four years, when Alina would come up with a new edition of Designing Brand Identity, it was intended to reflect how branding has changed. And it’s a book that you’re featured in as well. So maybe why don’t we kind of start with that topic?

How did you see the role of brand change at FedEx in the time that you were there? What was its purpose and its remit when you started and how did that evolve?

Monica: Yeah, that’s a great question. The evolution is true. think, you know, at the beginning, and fortunately, Fred Smith is definitely a visual and a brand champion. And so I was always fortunate enough to get to work with him and that he understood basically the value of a strong brand. But really, if you think about it, most people 25 years ago thought of brand as a logo. That’s really what people thought of. And it was like just your identity.

not really that a brand should be the expression of your business strategy and of who you are. Right? I always say be, say. Right? Who are we? What are we going to be? Are we going to do that and do it well? And then how are we going to speak about it or express that? And so I think, you know, at the very beginning of time, it was make sure the guidelines are out there, make sure there’s some guardrails, make sure the colors are right or whatever. And it really blossomed into how do we integrate businesses into our business?

What do we call them? What’s our strategy around that? How do we drive an experience that is one we want our customers to have? And how do we start talking about the brand experience, you know, being kind of the sum of all of your experiences with a company rather than just your identity? You know, we always internally use the hotel example. You know, the sum of your experiences at pick any hotel chain. What was the reservation system like? If you had an issue, how did customer service respond? Did your digital key work when you got there? You know, were your non-feather pillows in the room or did they still… So it’s this whole idea that it moved from kind of an identity and some colors and some guardrails to what is the experience and how does that represent our business strategy.

Gabriel: Can you take us into how those moments happened? Were they driven by big events like some of the major acquisitions that happened? Was it based on a leadership change or slowly chipping away at internal leaders saying, we should be doing this? Take us into some of those moments of how those moments of evolution happen in the role that brand plays.

Monica: think a lot of it was driven through acquisition. Because FedEx started as expressing federal documents, there it’s federal express. So it started out knowing who it was and what it was doing. And as it expanded beyond that, acquisition and really entry into new markets or new services and new product lines really drove us to think about who we are. We didn’t just express federal documents, right? And it was about the technology.

and the tracking and the information being almost as important as your actual package. And then it drove into we were going to grow globally. And what did that mean to have a global footprint? And how did we think about our company in terms of, know, Federal Express is kind of difficult to say, especially in some regions. And so that’s why we became FedEx, right? Acquisition, international acquisition. So a lot of times growing growth was the driver of those changes.

Holly: And Monica, I’m curious too, thinking about the category that you’re in, the average person may not distinguish between one carrier and another, right? If there are multiple options and my objective is to get my document there, and I’m not aware of what goes on as soon as I release it from my hands, it’s in your hands. How did that…

How did competitive differentiation come into play in how you chose to tell your story? How did you even begin to find a point of differentiation?

Monica: Well, I mean, think the business found it, In terms of, I think way back, absolutely positively overnight. So in terms of quality and excellence in our service, that really was a differentiator. And then being the first to launch tracking – we were the leader and had a lot of first year fast followers. And so it’s this idea that when we said that the information about the package was almost as important as the package. All of a sudden people were like, “Oh yeah, it is, because if I know where it is I can trust that it’s coming.”

All of that built the brand over time. So it was our operational excellence along with the information about that that built that trust and I think differentiation back in the day.

Holly: I’m curious, when you go from a logo and someone who supports brand in terms of looking sharp and having a sharp system, how did you evolve into the company actually having an ethos? And what was that process like? Where it was the idea of experience and really building things like a mission, a vision, a purpose. How did you help that become important also at FedEx?

Monica Skipper: I hate to say it this way, but it’s almost like trends in branding, and the evolution of the discipline itself also drives changes internally. So the growth and change of the company as well as the growth and change of the discipline.

I can remember us not thinking about customer experience and then all of a sudden we had a whole team, a quality action team, doing all sorts of research around what was our experience and how did people perceive it.

I think it’s this evolution of the discipline that we tried to be leaders in, to grab onto that and say, “Okay, you know what, that really makes sense. And that is really who we are and what we’re trying to be.”

We had a mission as a company more around operational excellence and we were like, “Yes, but what’s our North Star as a brand?” Not operationally, but as a business, where are we headed and, from a customer-looking perspective, where do we want that to sit? And how do we want that to live? And how do we want to really own it as, not just the brand team, but as FedExers to deliver on it?

When we acquired FedEx office (it was Kinko’s at the time), we wanted to be the back office for service professionals. So how do we tell that story? And how do we get people to believe that we can be that, given who we are in other sectors and other markets.

So it’s this whole idea around the changes drove other changes.

Holly: Kind of like what Gabe said at the start, right? You’ve had the chance to see the business evolve as the practice and the discipline of Brand has evolved.

Monica: That’s right. That’s right.

Gabriel: So let’s dig into this ethos piece because that’s probably the most common element that so many brand leaders need to work through – trying to get to that North Star. And the big challenge that we often hear… I know Holly, you faced this when you were at Sienna as well… in an engineering or operations or sales led organization, these words can start to seem quite fluffy and just become a marketing idea.

Take into the time machine and to some of the stories or conversations or realities or learnings where you had to convince, or things that you thought were growing great and in reality you realize that they were not getting it or that someone was going to shoot this initiative in the head.

Monica: [laughing] Yeah, I’ll never forget being asked to pull together a group of marketers from around the globe to come together to really redefine our brand. To really think about who we were and where we were going and that North Star.

We all came together in New York. We went through two days with a moderator and someone helping us get to all these core ideas and breakout groups. It was really about the business and how the brand would speak to the business, and what changes the business needed to make to deliver on the brand.

We got back to Memphis and I got a call that said, “Come see me.” So I go into the office and I hear, “That was not at all what I wanted.”

So we had just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bringing people in from around the world, having two days worth of sessions and really what was being asked of me was: update the brand identity, change our visual expression, change our voice.

It really wasn’t about what I thought it should have been about (which is the session I set up). Which was about what are we doing and how are we delivering on the brand and what decisions or actions should we take in the business if we want to be the brand that we say we want to be.

So that was the first time where I thought, maybe we are not building the bridge the same way. We’re both building, but it’s not aligning.

Gabriel: I think that context and definition is absolutely critical because it’s very easy for us to get idealistic to a point and say, that’s what we should be doing. And you might have a chance to get there at some point, but maybe not in that moment.

Monica: Maybe never.

Gabriel: Or maybe never.

Monica: I think the lesson learned for me was, let’s talk about what you mean about evolving the brand. Globally, let’s talk about what you expect the outcome to be.

Because I sent objectives, an agenda, who’s attending – I thought I had all my ducks in a row. And coming out of it, kind of the action items were really about, how do we build the castle on the hill and what are the steps to get us there so that we are delivering on that?

And that was not at all what was then the outcome. So that work and that time and that money just kind of was a big flush.

We started over and then really evolved our verbal and visual expression to be more current with who and what we were doing as a company and being able to communicate a more modern FedEx. Which I think is valuable, but without some of the business changes, I think it’s a little bit hollow.

Gabriel: It’s a really interesting tension point, isn’t it? This notion that we see brand as an opportunity to drive transformation and we want to act and behave more in the context of thinking as business transformation people. And we don’t always have that permission.

Monica: Correct. I think that’s the lesson.

Gabriel: Part of my takeaway also is – Are you saying that not everybody reads the pre-materials and review? [Monica and Holly laugh]. I think maybe embedded in what you said is the importance of going and having some of those one-on-ones before the workshop as well. Don’t assume that people are just going to read it.

Monica: That’s right.

Holly: But did it plant a seed? I mean, one thing I’m curious about is, is it worth doing?

So for anybody out there who’s in an organization like that – they’re at that point in the company’s trajectory where the business is not necessarily ready to change from an operational standpoint, but they want the brand to work harder. And sometimes that’s incongruous, it’s a challenge. It’s like, we’ve got to bring everything along or we’re not going to be authentic in what we say.

How do people chip away at that? How can they begin to widen others perceptions in an organization of what brand can and should be responsible for?

Monica: Well, I kind of think it’s the chicken or the egg.

Maybe this is not answering your question directly, Holly, but – Do you use communications and marketing and branding as the hammer to try to drive some of the business changes? Or do you try to drive changes in the business that then you communicate through branding and marketing?

So I think it’s the chicken or the egg and, I think, understanding in your organization what’s required. Does using the pull of the change of the communication, the branding, the expression, help drive the business changes? Or do you really need them to happen so that you then can communicate them? And I just think you need to understand in your organization what works.

Holly: The challenge is then, potentially, as you said, the expectation was you’d be updating guidelines, that you would be sort of dealing with the brand system, if you will.

Monica: Exactly.

Holly: I’m wondering if you felt like, “How did we agree on these objectives?” One of the things I’ve wondered a lot about… and if you had to pivot on this, I’d be so curious to know… where you have to write objectives differently because you can get other executives nodding along like, “Yeah, these objectives sound right.” And then four slides later, you’re off the rails again.

What did you learn about speaking their language? Did it cause you to change how you set the context for things?

Monica: Well, I didn’t go down that road again [Gabriel and Holly laugh] because I’d already landed in a ditch and I just wanted to stay out of the ditch.

We had a lot of fun that weekend, which was good, but we didn’t really get to an end result for the business. I think what Gabe said is right. People are not always reading the pre-read and they have an idea in their mind and even if they read it, contextually what they believe is going to happen is aligned with what their expectation was.

What I wrote down to try to get clarity on was what I understood from the initial discussion. Obviously I was wrong and I’ll just own that. Or I didn’t understand what was being requested. So I think it was just a life lesson. People don’t read the pre-reads. If they have an idea in their mind, their expectation is that even your agenda delivers that.

Gabriel: What were some of the things that you did over the time that you were at FedEx related to socialization and relationship building And having those conversations, outside of the workshops and the formal meetings?

Was that a part of your strategy? The time that you would spend, how much of that was deliberate? And how would you approach some of that?

Monica: I think, for me, it was really around aligning around the globe and really understanding the positioning of our brand in the different markets. Working as closely as I could with my peers across the regions and trying to learn as much as I could.

Sometimes that was in a meeting. Sometimes that was over Zoom. Sometimes that was when they were in town having tea… we’re big tea drinkers at FedEx, so, over a cup of tea, having a conversation that really enlightened me and helped me have a new and different perspective of the company overall and of our brand and our positioning in the world.

Using those… using sounds like such a bad word but using those relationships to help drive change because there were some of my peers who had relationships with some of my leaders. I had relationships with some of their leaders. So really working together, getting on the same page as a brand organization. And then working our network throughout the company and coming at it with the same message, but from different perspectives.

Aligning across the globe made it easier for us to get things done because we could say the same things to different people. Maybe in a way that was more relatable because of our role or because of our geographic location that would then help us build consensus. FedEx is very much a consensus building organization.

Build that consensus and move forward because we were all on the same page and collectively got our leaders on the same page.

Gabriel: So how can you get to a singular brand idea for an organization that is so global? You’re going to have the classic, “Well, that’s not going to work in our market. That’s too US centric.” And then you factor in all the acquisitions, where you’ve got all these different business unit leaders thinking about their own specific business or audience. You’re the only person that’s thinking about what’s better for the corporate entity, everyone else is just thinking about themselves.

Monica: I think it’s around adaptability and about modulation that makes sense for the business where it is. Who are they? What are they doing? What should they be saying about it in terms of their market? But then also how that fits into the umbrella of the brand.

For a long time, many of our markets internationally didn’t have intra-country. You couldn’t ship something from Nice to Paris but you could from Paris to Madrid. So understanding that they didn’t have intra-country service, but had across the country service. That’d be like saying to you in New York, you can’t ship upstate to Manhattan, which is odd to think about.

Understanding where we were in those markets and in our services, and understanding how they’d have to modulate their messaging because of their capabilities, is also critical. But knowing that has to be a part of the whole. The sum of the parts has to be greater than the whole. So how does that piece help tell our story, but tell it in a way that’s modulated and relevant for that market and for those capabilities.

Holly: I’m curious to know if you stumbled upon an outlier in any of those conversations. That’s happened to me and other peers of ours who have said, “I got through seven out of 12 conversations and then was stopped cold because in Southeast Asia, the objective or the customer is so different from the mothership.”

Talk us through any sort of rough edges that you had to smooth. And how did you do that?

Monica: Well, I remember one time somebody came to us and said they wanted to do like a FedEx superhero action figure. And I was like, “What?” And guess what? We let them do it. But it was Asia. So it’s really just understanding cultural nuance and differences and what’s acceptable.

I think people in the US might have laughed if we had put out an action figure FedEx superhero. Think of how ‘braggadocious’, for lack of a better word, that would be and chest beating and how it doesn’t really fit our brand.

Our brand is a little more professional, a little more… I hate to use this word, but sterile, a little more serious. And so that felt kind of way off brand to me, but it didn’t feel off brand in Asia.

As global as the world is, that action hero never got to the US, except on my desk, fortunately.

I am going to say this, because this is probably an unfair advantage that many people don’t have. The chairman of the company understands branding and understands the importance of branding and the importance of the consistency of who we are around the world. That helped me unfairly in a way that many people in organizations probably don’t have.

I fortunately had an open dialogue with him very frequently. That is not fair… I had the card and I played it, right?

Gabriel: Some do. Yeah, it was a huge enabler for you. How would he talk about it, Monica?

If he was talking to other CEOs and he’s talking about the importance of brand – What kind of language would he use, how would he talk about it? Whether it’s to the others in the organization or if he had a leader who didn’t quite get it.

Monica: Well, that’s really interesting. I don’t know that I saw him speak to a lot of other CEOs. Most of our discussions were internal.

Gabriel: Hypothetically, how would he talk about it and frame it?

Monica: Hypothetically. I mean, I can’t speak for him. The guy’s brilliant and started a company that employs 600,000 people worldwide. Think about that.

I think he understood the foundation and that our brand is really an expression of our business. And he understood the criticality of that.

I remember one time he was talking to a group of team members (I think some media might have been there) when we did the Kinko’s acquisition. And he said something to the effect of, here’s the new identity… I mean, he got down to the details… here’s the new font that we’re going to use, and we’re going to be changing that font on all of our other operating companies as well.

I was like, “Oh yeah.” We didn’t know that. We didn’t think that. I mean, ideally that would have been where we would have gone. But he just showed the new identity. It had a new font – a kind of a sans serif typeface, much more modern, much more current. And then it was his immediate next step to think visually that we were going to make that change across all of our other operating companies so that we would drive consistency and bring them into this more modern place.

Again an unfair advantage. I used it because he was so visual and understood the importance not only of that visual consistency, but of delivering on our brand around the world. And I think he would say, delivering on our brand promise.

On all of our paychecks, it said, “I will make every FedEx experience outstanding.” He understood the value of that and that if we collectively didn’t do that, we wouldn’t be delivering on our brand.

Gabriel: Maybe that’s the better question, Monica, what were some of those moments? You just gave a great example of one, but I’m wondering if there are any others where he did something where you were able to sit back, cross your arms, put your head back and just smile and go, “Wow, he gets it.” The example you just gave is a great one. Any others come to mind?

Monica: One where we were in a meeting and a senior leader asked, “Well does that mean that we’re not going to allow people to do this?” I didn’t have to say anything, he said, “That’s right. That’s exactly what we mean because we have guardrails and we have an expression of our brand and to say we are going to do something is to say we’re not going to do something else.” And I was like, “Done.”

Holly: Powerful.

Monica: Yeah. Basically, he said of course that’s what she’s saying. It also feels pretty good to get that kind of support, right? It’s like, “Okay, it’s done.”

Gabriel: Were there other times where you had to pull in some air cover because you’re in a massive organization like FedEx? Sometimes you have a CEO who gets it, but maybe you have lieutenants or the VP level or that kind of frozen middle management maybe who don’t get it. And sometimes you as a brand leader might come into conflict with that team and you need some of that air cover or you need that North Star. Did you ever need to do that or was FedEx culture so top down, it was so clear that everyone got it?

Monica: Well, it wouldn’t be fair to say I never had conflict with another VP in the organization over something related to brand. I mean, that’s just crazy.

I always try to work with people. I always try to work to say yes and work to get to yes. What I always try to do is – help me understand what you’re trying to achieve and we’ll find a way within the brand to get to yes. Rather than just saying no.

Nobody wants to be the police. I hated being the police. There were times when someone would ask, “Well, where is that in the guidelines? Give me a ruler. I don’t…”, and I was like, that is not who I am. That is not the world I want to live in.

I remember one time somebody put like ducks on a poster and wrote “cheap cheap” on it. And I was like, “Who is doing this? And why do they think it’s our brand?” This was one of those moments where I was like, you obviously don’t get the brand if you think we could put rubber ducks on a poster and write “cheap cheap” on it.

You know, maybe what they were trying to say is there’s a less expensive way to ship, or we have a more affordable economy service. And so I kept saying, what are you trying to say? Let’s find a way that’s on brand to say it. Cheap cheap and rubber ducks is not at all consistent with the FedEx brand. Wasn’t then, isn’t now, and I would assume will never be.

So yeah, I had conflicts all the time. People wanted to put co-brands… I keep going back to Office, that was a big acquisition and it was different. If you think about differences… Holly, you probably experience this a ton… people in the organization come and say, but I’m different.

I was like, “Well, you have FedEx in your name. I guess you’re not that different.” But everybody’s different. So they’d say, we’re retail, so we’re different. And they wanted to co-brand in the store. And I was like, we can do that but let’s not do it the way that you want to do it. Let’s find a way that works for the brand and the other brand but also works under our umbrella.

It might go a level above us, but we didn’t typically have to call in the chairman to tell anybody they couldn’t do it.

Holly: Did that force you to get even more clear about the brand tenants? You didn’t want to play cop, nor could you afford to, right? You can’t have eyes in the back of your head thinking about… Gabe and I were talking about the sheer number of surfaces where your brand shows up. I mean, it is almost ubiquitous. It’s like a Starbucks… How do you sleep at night?

How do you set up a system that allows you to not worry all the time? I’m curious if you had sort of a forgiveness rule, like an 80/20 thing – like I need 80% of this to be right, but I’m going to allow 20% of it to veer.

How did you manage to get sleep at night with such a huge ecosystem?

Monica: There were some nights I didn’t sleep, just to be honest, because it is huge. And to get your hands around it… but we did a lot of touchpoint studies to understand the highest value touchpoints.

Our drivers are one of the highest value touchpoints at FedEx. And so is their uniform right? And what can we do to ensure that they’re right?

When I used to travel with the first brand director ever, we’d see people out of uniform, and she’d say, “Hey, what’s your name? What’s your employee number?” And I was like, “Whoa.” Or we’d see a truck that had been wrecked, and she’d get the vehicle number off of the truck, and she would send it off to the vehicle team and say this truck needs to be fixed.

Because she was the first and the longest tenured, she had a lot of… you know, I’ll call it “Gail says”, she could say this needs to happen and it would happen. And I remember thinking, that is not going to happen if I’m in that role. And so it really was – to your point, Holly – what are the most important touchpoints and what can we do to try to make those right most of the time.

I mean, think about the nights I didn’t sleep. One of the nights I didn’t sleep was when the video came out of the courier who threw a TV over the fence onto the ground. While that’s an operations issue, it’s a brand issue because that’s what people think about a brand.

So it’s like, let’s get those delivering your package and the courier coming to your house or your business – I mean think about that, that’s a really high value touchpoint. They’ve got to deliver the right service and they’ve got to look the right way. If somebody comes to your house in a blank truck with no uniform on, do you trust them? Does that build confidence? Do you think they really are who they say they are? Or do you think they’re there to take something out of your garage?

I remember at that point we put labels inside of the truck that said, “Is your uniform on? Do not throw a package. Remember there are cameras everywhere that will catch you.” Just a little reminder as they were going into the truck on these really high value and important things. You cannot police at all.

I also had really good work in relationships with our operating companies. I work with maybe the comms person or someone in a leadership role that understood marketing and comms who worked within that business unit.

Like someone would come to me and say, “Okay, we’re hiring all of these temporary additional vehicles, we’re renting them at the holidays so that we can be sure that we can meet our customers’ demand. But they’re not going to be branded.” And I was like, “Well, is the person driving them going to be branded? Can we add magnets on those vehicles as a short-term way to reassure people that it is our brand and we are delivering?”

So just working to try to find solutions that are amenable, affordable, and will really solve for the bigger concern without it being the best or the ideal. Because you can never get to ideal, I don’t think.

Gabriel: I want to double-click on a couple of things here. One, what you talked about, this touch point importance exercise. That sounds an awful lot like kind of journey mapping. Is that really what it was?

Can you take us under the hood into what was the process and the approach to get to that touch point importance? And what’s the output of that? Like, is that a number? This one’s an eight, this one’s a three?

Monica: Yeah, kind of. It was kind of relative, not an eight or a three, but more like this came up as the most important and maybe the most expensive to change. And this one came up as the least important, but maybe the least expensive to change. And everywhere in between. We kind of put it on a grid and said, this top quartile is what we need to focus on. And these experiences, these visual expressions, these verbal expressions, they’re the most important. So how do we start there? All of them are important, but these are relatively the most important.

Gabriel: And I imagine that with a business with so many different audiences as well… because you’ve got the consumer, you’ve got business, even within business, you’ve got different service lines… how did you decide which ones to focus in on first?

Was it based on looking at revenue split? Like, okay, we’re going to take the top five by revenue? Or sometimes what I’ve heard is that you focus on the ones you might have some NPS data, or some other data that this is an area of the business where we know there’s a bit of an experience or brand problem.

Monica: We really used the research to tell us what was important. It was from a customer perspective – What was important to customers and what did they value the most?

We did an importance and value from the customer’s perspective because revenue split would say, then we don’t need to do anything for small businesses or their voice doesn’t need to be heard. And that’s completely not appropriate. So it was really about the cross-section of customers.

You’d be surprised how aligned… whether they were a really large customer or a very small customer, or even a retail customer… how aligned they were on what experience and which touchpoints mattered most to them and which ones were the most valuable to them. I mean, think about it, we’re all individuals.

Whether we work at a business or work for ourselves or go into a retail store, we’re all individuals. So our perception of that touchpoint and the value and importance can be very similar unless you’re just an outlier in some way.

Gabriel: Going back to the almost the start of the conversation, in order to even have permission to do this type of work and study, you have to have that cross-functional alignment. Because to your point, yes, you built great relationships with the comms team within one of the business unit. But like I said, many of these things in order to fix them, they’re going to be operational. So did you have those teams involved from the very start?

What was that process and approach to get that alignment? Any kind of learnings or insights for others? Because I’m sure there are a lot of brand leaders who would want to do that work, but they can’t get their ops or customer service or IT team to participate. Or they know that if they do it, they’ve got their own priorities.

Monica: [laughs] That is so true! They do have their own priorities.

We did a program called Brando and it was really around getting the frontline involved in what was important to them and what their barriers and challenges were. How we could help them and then to tell them how they could help us.

We went in and interviewed a bunch of couriers. Had the touchpoint study. Know what’s important. Then, what are the barriers to doing this? They might’ve needed new uniforms. They might’ve needed funding for uniforms. Well, that’s an operational concern that is certainly a brand concern.

Being able to go to bat and say, if we’re going to deliver on this for customers (these things that are important in this upper quartile), here are the things that we’re either going to have to invest in or we’re going to have to change. That little label that we put inside the vehicles kind of came out of that idea. Putting a label inside a truck is not very expensive, but it can be a very nice reminder of what’s expected on that delivery.

It’s finding the path of least resistance that gives you the most return and figuring out who to work with within the organization that can help enable that.

Gabriel: That label in the truck is the equivalent of what you hear sometimes where you’ve got the mission on the back of the badge.

Holly: Yeah.

Monica: That’s right. That’s exactly right. But in this case, it was much more tactical and applicable for them in the moment of delivery. Which is what we heard was very important and very valuable. So it’s finding the opportunity in the moment, at that point that would help with that – Remember you’re on camera, remember people are looking at your uniform, do not toss a package. Like in the moment, it was the delivery in the moment.

Gabriel: And why was the program called Brando?

Monica: I don’t know, we made it up. But you know, Brando is kind of a cool name, right?

Holly: The Godfather.

Gabriel: As in like Marlon Brando?

Monica: Right.

Gabriel: You were giving it a persona and a name. You were kind of ahead of the game in this age of creating avatars or chatbots. You were thinking ahead.

Holly: Creating a brand you couldn’t refuse.

Monica: Yeah, exactly.

Gabriel: Monica, this has been absolutely wonderful. Wonderful start to our series, amazing learnings. And thank you for being on with us.