How does your brand stand up to the heat?

What does this ice cream have to do with a piece re BRAND REPRESENTATION? Well yesterday this ice cream, or more accurately the business I bought it from, got me thinking about brand representation and the ways in which our people portray our businesses.

Like it or not, planned or given no thought, every single member of your team represents your brand when they are working, when they are out in branded clothing, and when they talk about you to others. 

Yesterday my hubby and I had enjoyed a day out in the sunshine and stopped on our way home for an ice cream. We went to a well established cafe that has been in its current location as long as I can remember. Take away ice cream is a small part of their business with hot food, fish and chips, filled rolls etc being their main thing. But even as a small part of their business, they do sell ice cream, it was a hot day, and they were busy. 

Good for business or so you’d think but that certainly wasn’t the impression they were giving. I don’t know who the people I observed were but assume from the way other team members deferred to them that they were owners or managers. 

Our experience today involved:

• Being greeted on entry with a brusque “are you here to queue for ice cream too”
• An announcement to the room that “this wasn’t the way I thought people would queue for ice cream today” 
• Huffing and grumbling each time the queue was passed
• Being interrupted as I was about to order and having to listen to criticism of a customer being made to the young man serving the ice cream
• Observing a young couple with a toddler ask for a teaspoon to help their little one eat her ice cream and being snapped at that they paid takeaway prices and shouldn’t be eating indoors. 

I get that it was busy, and they were under pressure, but I won’t be going back and I left with a really negative view of this business.

I also left with a head full of thoughts about how our team at FCSS represent us as a business.

Lots of reflection, looking at feedback, and thinking about my own observations in our services leave me thinking: 

• Our core values of putting people first, being flexible and accessible, nurturing and learning together, being committed to quality, acting with integrity, doing the right thing and being solution focussed and resilient, mean that we treat people as we would want to be treated.

• We use our values based recruitment to ensure that anyone who joins the team understands that we are privileged to serve the children, families, and communities we work with and we’re building more focus on this into our induction processes. 

• We role model appropriate behaviour in our own actions, we think about the language we use and the way we involve our people.

• We welcome feedback and are proactive in seeking it, are transparent in sharing information on performance, quality standards, future planning and more. 

I think in general our team are pretty good at representing us the way we want to be seen, but like anything there is always more we can do. 

I’d already been thinking about widening our self evaluation and review processes to include consulting visitors to our services, partners we work with, suppliers and more. We already include service users and our team, but it would be good to hear how others see us. 

Any tips? Does anyone ask for feedback from third parties? And if you do how do you use the information you gather?