We all know a brand means, in essence, what its customers say it means. A company can shout from the rooftops what it stands for and bellow the fine-point details of its customer-centric promises, but all the best marketing and PR in the world can’t save a brand from lack of follow-through on the part of customer-facing employees. Am I right?

In Branded Customer Service, by Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart, the authors turn the equation upside-down and pose the question, “What do brands think about their customers?”

Barlow and Stewart offer as an example, Rolex. What does Rolex think of its customers – in my case, me? Their conclusion: I’m not good enough for a Rolex. While I might be tempted to quibble with the notion of falling short of a standard of good enough, there’s no doubt I’m not wealthy enough to drop $10,000 on a luxury watch. Nonetheless, The point is well taken: Rolex’s demographic is limited, I’m not in it, and the brand is perfectly comfortable with me knowing it.

That got me thinking, what does Best Buy (my employer) think of its customers?

Read on …

All this social media chatter about personal branding reminds me of the dot-com bubble-and-burst of the late ’90s and early double-nots, when entrepreneurs put marketing and advertising in front of anything resembling business fundamentals and watched their stock prices skyrocket … until someone said, “Hey, wait a minute …”

Fast forward to today. Social media is on fire with advice for staking out your little place in the spotlight and promoting your personal brand via personal websites, blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. It’s not terrible advice if that’s your thing, but as was the case in the dot-com era, the focus too often is marketing and advertising, with fundamentals again getting short shrift.

If you need evidence, check out the Twitter widget at right. Read the personal branding tweets as they appear. You’ll see things like, “7 key ways to promote your personal brand,” “10 indispensable tools for personal branding,” “Building personal brand within the social media landscape,” and on and on.

Someone needs to say it, so it might as well be me: “Hey, wait a minute …”

Read on …