You’re Only As Strong As Your Weakest Link
Your brand identity has to be communicated throughout the organization. Even down to your weakest link. Let me give you an example.
The other day we took guests visiting from St. Thomas on a Boston Duck Tour. We hyped them up for a fun day and a lot of “quacking”. The Boston Duck Tours are known for quacking at pedestrians or other Duck Boats. It’s corny but fun. Even I do it.
The tour started with our driver “Marco the Plumber” who was dressed like one of the Mario Brothers:
Marco seemed like a very nice man and was informative. But we couldn’t have had any less fun. I actually nodded off during the tour. The people behind me actually said and I quote, “we just lost two hours of our lives”. During the tour another Duck Boat approached us and Marco actually said, “do you want to quack at that boat (he never discussed quacking during the tour so some of the guests looked at him cross eyed)? I was thinking yea, that’s fun…let’s do it. Then Marco said, “I never tell people to quack or not, it’s up to you”.
What? It’s up to me? No Marco it’s not. It’s part of your brand and therefore your brand is only as strong as you, Marco. We should have been instructed on the quacking at the start of the tour, then visitors could have had fun quacking at people walking by. Even pedestrians quacked at the Duck Boat, although we looked at them in confusion.
Marco lacked the qualities of being a Duck Boat tour guide, mainly he was not funny and he repeated the same attractions over and over again. We drove by the Boston Garden twice and he never mentioned it. That’s sort of famous I guess?
I actually apologized to our guests as my wife and I have been on other Duck Boat Tours that have been fun.
Moral of this story? No matter who your weakest link is they need to stay on brand. They need to know and understand the brand. Then they need to deliver on it consistently. Now I’m not bashing Marco, he was a nice man. Maybe he was having a bad day? And I’ve had other tours that were great. But on this day I felt like we just threw away $140 for little to no value.
If you have drivers, delivery people, movers, customer service people…remember these could be the face of your brand and ultimately the weakest link.
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September 11th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
You’ve had other tours that were great so you’re probably more likely to give it another go over someone whose first and only experience with Boston Duck Tours was with this bland tour guide.
It’s said you need more customers spreading positive word-of-mouth about your organization to counteract the amount spreading negative word-of-mouth.
Hopefully Boston Duck Tours has more superstar tour guides properly representing their brand than guides like “Marco the Plumber”