In my book, Overpromise and Overdeliver, I explain how to differentiate your brand by designing and delivering extraordinary customer experiences that instantly differentiate your company. This is achieved by understanding TouchPoints: points of contact between your organization and your customers. These TouchPoints are divided into three categories: Product TouchPoints, Systems TouchPoints and Human TouchPoints. This is because most businesses put too much focus on one type of TouchPoint, which causes the customer experience to be "unbalanced" and therefore inconsistent. 

Once you know how to create exceptional Product, Systems, and Human TouchPoints, next comes the most challenging and most fun part of the process... checking the alignment of all of these TouchPoints with your Overpromise.

Let's first look at alignment done right. Minute Clinic is a chain of urgent care clinics now owned by CVS Pharmacies. Minute Clinic's Overpromise is "You're Sick. We're Quick." Let's look at how their exceptionally tight alignment of their TouchPoints consistently and powerfully Overdelivers on their Overpromise.

Product TouchPoints

Minute Clinic doesn't require appointments, so when you're sick you can get in quickly. Minute Clinic has extended hours so you can get in more quickly than waiting for your doctor’s regular office hours. Because they treat a limited list of ailments, treatment takes 15 minutes or less. That all adds up to quick treatment when you are sick.

A Quick Decision: Prices range from $30-$110 and they accept most insurance, which means that the decision to go to the Minute Clinic first can be a quick one. If Minute Clinic can’t help you, they will make a quick referral to the closest facility that can treat you. There is also no charge for their services to determine that your needs are beyond their scope of care... once again making the decision to choose Minute Clinic quick and easy. Minute Clinic also guarantees their diagnosis. If you are not cured within the specified time, the second visit and your medicine are free!

Systems TouchPoints

Minute Clinic has more than 400 locations in 27 states. That means that for the states they serve, the drive to a Minute Clinic is quick. Co-location with the pharmacy means that getting the medicine you need is quick as well. Minute Clinic zaps the prescription right to their pharmacy with your name, address, phone number, doctor, insurance, credit card and other information already completed so the pharmacist just has to fill the prescription and you can get it into your system quickly.

The coolest parts of the Minute Clinic system are the sign in kiosk and the diagnostics software, both designed for speed. When you enter the Minute Clinic you see a kiosk that invites you to sign in and enter all of your pertinent information. But if you are a returning customer, the kiosk will recognize you within a few keystrokes and welcome you back by letting you know that it already has all of your information. You just need to confirm that it is correct with one keystroke. Within seconds, the exam room door opens and you are invited in for diagnosis.

The diagnostic software is decision tree software that prompts your exam with a series of basic questions. Your answers to those questions prompt another series of questions. Your answers to those questions drive yet another round of questions. Within three to four rounds of questions (and confirming tests and checks by your examiner), you have been correctly diagnosed. I have used Minute Clinic on numerous occasions and I am consistently astounded by how accurate and quick their diagnoses are. They have accurately diagnosed my kids on several occasions where I thought there was nothing wrong beyond the common cold. On one occasions they correctly diagnosed pneumonia when my son had virtually no symptoms. Note that speed alone would not be a benefit if the diagnosis was not accurate. The software’s ability to accurately diagnose so quickly is really at the heart of the Minute Clinic business model.

Human TouchPoints

Minute Clinic uses nurse practitioners rather than doctors to staff their clinics. This contributes to their ability to be quick in several ways. First, it keeps costs low, which as we have seen, contributes to quick decisions. Second, it allows for more locations (because costs are low, volumes can be lower and still profitable). Third, it contributes to the ability to offer extended hours because they can cover more hours for less cost than they could with doctors. Fourth, insurance companies encourage and incentivize the use of nurse practitioners by covering their costs more comprehensively. Fifth, nurse practitioners are more likely to follow protocols and align their advice with the software diagnosis than doctors who are trained to think more independently and more broadly about potential issues. That, in turn, gives predictability to malpractice insurance underwriters who have to assess the risk of insuring Minute Clinic, which of course brings costs down.

What I hope you can see from this example is that EVERY TouchPoint reinforces and amplifies quickness! Minute Clinic, from the company name to the Overpromise to the integration with the pharmacy, is all about being QUICK! Every TouchPoint enables and accelerates the speed at which they can accurately diagnose and treat anyone of the ailments they cover. It is this tight, self reinforcing alignment of TouchPoints that makes Minute Clinic work.

It is this same tight alignment of literally hundreds of TouchPoints that makes the client focused Values Based Financial Planning Turn-key Business Model™ work for our advisors. It is what enables them to earn exceptionally high incomes while serving their clients at the highest levels in the industry, working just three days per week.

Are YOUR TouchPoints Aligned?

Are your TouchPoints aligned to reinforce and amplify your Overpromise? If not, ask yourself what you can do to more tightly align them. Your clients should be able to know what your Overpromise is just by encountering a single TouchPoint. The magic of the Overpromise and Overdeliver methodology is in the alignment. Stop doing anything that is out of alignment and put more energy into getting every product, service, activity and team member precisely aligned and your clients will quickly see the difference start driving your brand using the world’s most powerful marketing tool… word of mouth.

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Rick Barrera's article was featured in the June 2010 issue of The Trusted Financial Advisor

Rick Barrera is a branding expert and customer service speaker, as well as the author of the bestselling book: Overpromise and Overdeliver: The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty. 

TouchPoints are points of contact between your organization and your customers. I divide these TouchPoints into three categories: Product TouchPoints, Systems TouchPoints and Human TouchPoints. I do this because most businesses put too much focus on one type of TouchPoint, which causes the customer experience to be "unbalanced" and therefore inconsistent.

We have all experienced a restaurant with great food but poor service, or great service but poor food, or even great food and service in a poor location with dirty or old infrastructure. Each of these restaurants is at risk of failure for differing reasons. By understanding the different types of TouchPoints and ensuring a consistently extraordinary experience across all three types, each restaurant could dramatically improve their odds of success.

Read Rick Barrera's entire article, A TouchPoint Exercise to Help Retain Customers

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Rick Barrera is a best-selling author, consultant, and speaker on customer experience, branding, marketing, and increasing sales. For more resources and tools, visit his websites at www.overpromise.com & www.barrera.com.

How's this for a fantasy? Each day you arrive early at your office only to find that you already have several voicemails and emails from potential clients who having been referred to you, would like to transfer all of their assets to you, and would like to meet with you to see how soon that would be possible. Wouldn't that be the Easiest Business in the World to run?

"It would be awesome," you say. "My life would be grand! No more cold calls! No more seminars! I would be rich!" But how did your business get that way. The only way your business could get to that place without being a complete fantasy would be to design a practice that consistently delivered an EXTRAORDINARY CLIENT EXPERIENCE.

It's time for a reality check. How extraordinary would your client experience have to be for you to get daily or weekly unsolicited referrals from your clients? What service levels would you have to provide? What systems would you have to have in place to ensure that you are delivering that level of service to every client in every interaction? What level of employee would you have to recruit? How well would you have to train them? How organized and disciplined would your meeting preparation have to be? What quality of advice would you have to deliver? How would they have to feel about you at the end of each meeting? How well would they have to sleep at night knowing that you had their financial back? How much trust would they have to have in you to refer their closest friends and colleagues to you, suggesting that on their say alone, those people transfer control of their entire financial life to you?

Before you read the next paragraph go back and answer each of the questions above. REALLY! Do it RIGHT NOW! You'll get nothing from reading this article unless you get out a sheet of paper and really do this exercise. You've already taken time from your practice to read this article so you may as well take a little bit more to get some real value from it.

Now, compare your answers to those questions to the REALITY of your current business. I think you'll agree that there is a considerable gap between the ideal practice you outlined above and what you and your team are delivering now. I know you are trying hard and everyone is doing their best. That's not the point. Your competitors are doing their best as well. But without a deliberate business design to create an EXTRAORDINARY CLIENT EXPERIENCE it will never happen.

That's what Overdelivering is all about... designing your business on purpose to ensure that at each critical client TouchPoint, you, your systems and processes, AND your team are all seamlessly aligned to create a specific emotion in every client interaction. Only when you can consistently generate your desired emotion, on cue, for every client, will you have built the referral generation machine you fantasized about at the beginning of this article.

If you've written out detailed answers to the questions above, your next step is to have your team do the same. Then, you'll need to have regular meetings to work ON your business until you have systematically closed the gaps between your ideal business model and your current business model. To get there quickly, you'll need to set aside several hours each week to design your future business model and implement the actions required to close the gaps.

You'll know you have succeeded when you start to consistently receive unsolicited referrals to clients who fit your Ideal Client Profile. Of course it's a lot of work, but you knew that already. My title didn't fool you a bit. The Easiest Business in the World isn't a fantasy. It is the reality that is well within your grasp, if you design your business to consistently Overdeliver EXTRAORDINARY CLIENT EXPERIENCES.

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Rick Barrera's article was featured in Volume 9, Issue 12 of The Trusted Financial Advisor

Rick Barrera is a branding expert and customer service speaker, as well as the author of the bestselling book: Overpromise and Overdeliver: The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty. 

Gone are the days when a company could hope to succeed by offering a good product and backing it up with respectable customer service.

In today's overstocked, cutthroat global economy, consumers demand a superior experience from start to finish. Notable names like the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, Chico's, and the Container Store, among others, meet the challenge by devising outstanding brand promises -- they "overpromise" -- to attract customers, and then "overdeliver" by giving those customers more than they ever expected, at the Human TouchPoint and at every other point of contact with their customers.

By making sure that their Human, Product, and System TouchPoints are all honed to perfection, they are practicing a winning technique that I call TouchPoint Branding.

The Human TouchPoint occurs the moment a member of your sales, service, or technical staff interacts in person or over the phone with a customer. The value of the Human TouchPoint derives from the fact that your frontline people can support your innovative brand promise in ways that only fellow humans are capable of -- by empathizing with customers, for instance, clearing up misunderstandings, and tailoring solutions to a customer's particular circumstance. They can bend, and sometimes break, the rules in a customer-friendly fashion.

In other words, they can overdeliver in ways that trigger instant customer gratification and long-lasting loyalty.

The downside is the unpredictability of human emotions. The degree to which the Human TouchPoint fulfills your brand promise depends on how the customer feels about interacting with your employee.

Control and consistency can never be guaranteed, which makes the Human TouchPoint less reliable than the other two critical points of customer contact. But the unpredictability can be mitigated by intensive training and a corporate culture and hiring policies that stress the importance of personal interaction. The personal touch reigns supreme at the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, a subsidiary of Marriott International.

People staying at a Ritz-Carlton hotel expect more than a comfortable bed and a hot shower. They want what the chain's founder, Cesar Ritz, defined as "the luxury hotel experience," and that means extraordinary human service with a winning smile. The hotel's fine linens, handcrafted furniture, and French-milled soaps are part of the luxury experience, but not the centerpiece. Each Ritz facility is a study in personal service, a global Human TouchPoint. At the Ritz Paris, for example, a staff of more than 500 serves only 106 rooms, 56 suites, and 11 apartments.

At Ritz-Carlton hotels, the bellmen are authorized to spend as much as $2,000 to help solve a customer's problem. Ask for directions to a location inside the hotel and you'll get a personal escort. All requests are met with the response, "It would be my pleasure, Sir (or Madam)." The phrase, "that's not my job," is expressly forbidden.

The Container Store, a purveyor of storage and organization products, is a role model for that kind of service and grounds its brand promise in a simple reality: It hires fewer frontline people than its competitors, but it trains and coaches them superbly and pays them from 50 percent to 100 percent more than the going industry average. The result: extremely motivated and enthusiastic employees who happily greet customers and seem to enjoy their jobs. They also listen carefully, respond intelligently, and suggest ingenious space- and time-saving solutions designed to simplify a customer's life.

To attain this preferred environment, the company espouses a set of guiding principles that stress the Golden Rule, flexibility, and intense training. Indeed, all first-year, full-time Container Store employees receive 235 hours of training, as compared to the industry average of seven hours. New part-timers and even veterans receive extensive training, too. All new employees, including office staff, spend their first week working in a store. An exceedingly low turnover rate -- a product of a pleasurable working environment -- is what makes this regimen affordable for the company.

When approaching a customer's problem, Container Store employees are encouraged to think big, to expand the boundaries in order to devise a great solution that not only wows the customer, but, as it usually turns out, also sells more product. Having hired the best people, paid them handsomely, trained them thoroughly, and indoctrinated them in the culture, the company expects them to perform at their peak. And they do.

It's true that Human TouchPoints are critical in virtually every business, but, as I said before, they do have their limits. Many organizations rely on their frontline people more than they should, consigning their company's fate to the vagaries of unpredictable human relationships. It's critical that you recognize the pros and cons of the Human TouchPoint, and do what you must to minimize the drawbacks.

Look around your business. Have you assigned sufficient resources to hiring and training the right salespeople and service representatives? Does your company's culture support them and inspire them to magnificent achievement? Have you created an environment of mutual trust between leaders, employees, and customers? Are you providing the proper rewards and incentives? If you can answer yes to all of these questions, you have most likely designed a Human TouchPoint that advances your brand promise. The payoff will be a higher level of sales and profitability.

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Rick Barrera is a branding expert and customer service speaker, as well as the author of the bestselling book: Overpromise and Overdeliver: The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty.   Rick Barrera's programs help companies to create breakthrough brands and deliver extraordinary customer experiences.

Happy customers buy more, upgrade more, consume more, pay more, tell others and put more dollars on your bottom line. Isn't it worth investing some time and energy to create a breakthrough customer experience that will keep your existing customers loyal and win new customers in their first encounter with you?  It really is possible to create a breakthrough customer experience in the next 30 days and YOU can lead that effort.

Branding expert and author of Overpromise and Overdeliver: Designing and Delivering Extraordinary Customer Experiences, Rick Barrera shares 7 steps to create a breakthrough experience for your customers.  In this 7 page eBook, you'll learn:

• 4 methods for dramatically changing your customer's experience
• What are the right metrics to measure from your customer's point of view?
• What you can accomplish in just 30 days - and how to get started

Read the eBook: 30 Days to a Breakthrough Customer Experience by Rick Barrera

When I address business audiences, I often ask people to share their companies' brand promises. To my amazement, many don't have articulated promises at all. And those that do are often given to promises so fuzzy as to seem indistinguishable from those made by thousands of enterprises in any and all markets. These self-deluders tell me their brand promise is "world-class quality," or "guaranteed best service," or "a company you can trust." My unspoken comment is harsh: So what?

In a world where winners shout distinctive promises, these misguided companies whisper sweet nothings and set themselves up to lose.

A generic promise has no meaning to the customer.

You have to be specific: First, discover who your consumers really are and what they expect from you. Second, tell them exactly how your unique product or service (or both) will consistently meet their needs and unfailingly arrive on time, in order, as advertised. Third, do exactly what you promise - always. Finally, forget about trying to use incremental product or service improvements to win customers to your brand.

In a time when every market is saturated and margins are paper-thin, small-bore fixes will never be enough to jump-start flagging sales and profits. Success demands that you create a brand promise so radically different from those of your rivals that you first set yourself apart from the competition, and then fulfill that promise - brilliantly. You must overpromise and overdeliver, as the title of my book suggests.

Many businesses are doomed from the get-go. They simply never invest enough time or money to pinpoint their markets, fully identify each significant element of their brand, and craft a unique promise consistent with those elements. To get off to a winning start, remember that a promise is a serious commitment, a pledge to do or deliver something at a particular time, without fail. And a brand promise, in particular, expresses all the things that set your brand apart from the competition, all the characteristics that make it distinctive - which is why it's so critical that you live up to your pledge.

Nothing kills a brand faster than an empty promise (just ask tire maker Firestone, a unit of Japan's Bridgestone Corporation, which had to mount a massive recall a few years back after tread separation was implicated in scores of auto-crash deaths; the brand suffered incalculable damage when it lost the trust of consumers who had relied on its tires to perform safely). To put it succinctly, a true brand promise sums up the essence of the brand.

Hardiplank's brand promise, for example, reassures homeowners that their siding will keep them snug and secure for years, while Orville Redenbacher's brand promise simply guarantees popcorn lovers that they will get more of what they love.

Whether simple or profound, the promise must be so radically different from what everyone else in the market is promising that the customer hears you even though you aren't shouting. In other words, great brand promises cut through the chatter because they speak directly to customers about an issue that matters deeply to them.

How to accomplish all this?

As with just about every successful venture in life, you have to start with a firm grounding in the basics - in this case, by truly understanding the meaning of "brand." When I ask audiences, "What is a brand?" I typically hear that it is the mark or logo you stamp on everything you make. It's true that the term "branding" comes from the practice of searing livestock with the mark of a ranch to signify ownership. But in today's business environment, branding has come to mean much more than a way to prevent rustlers from riding off with your property. The great adman David Ogilvy defined brand as "the intangible sum of a product's attributes: its name, packaging and price, its history, its reputation and the way it's advertised."

Brands also carry emotional impact and fulfill deep-seated needs. They connect with a customer's identity and deep aspirations, express personality, and telegraph one's role in the community and desired social status. In the end, your brand is shorthand for a host of qualities, features, benefits, beliefs, and business practices that the customer associates with your company, and that he or she is willing to lay out the money to acquire.

Take the Sony brand, for instance. When I ask people what Sony means to them, I get such responses as "high quality, innovative, expensive but worth the money, latest features, user-friendly, intuitive interface designs, and cool electronics."

Yet, when customers shop for a new DVD player, they don't say, "I'm looking for a high-quality, innovative, expensive-but-worth-the-money, cool, user-friendly DVD player with the latest features and an intuitive interface design." Instead, they use their shorthand: "I want a Sony DVD player."

So it follows that the only way you can know what your brand is, is to ask your customers. Whatever they tell you is the reality.

Your job is to minimize the variations and the changes by sharply defining the brand's promise and then holding it as steady as possible - until you decide it needs to be changed. Once you've crafted a strong, differentiating brand promise based on your understanding of what customers expect from you, you are on the way to building the value of your company.

As brands like Orville Redenbacher, Lexus, and Starbucks have proven, defining and delivering on the right promise can lead to near-legendary status as a company whose products are so coveted that sales continue to grow even as the price climbs. In short, radical brand differentiation that resonates with customers means enormous increases in your profit and the addition of untold value to your brand.

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Rick Barrera is a leading sales and marketing speaker.  His Overpromise and Overdeliver program helps companies to create breakthrough brands and deliver extraordinary customer experiences.   You can find out more about Rick and his programs at www.overpromise.com. 

In the face of a global recession, we need real selling skills more than ever.

"Nothing happens until somebody BUYS something" seems to be the new mantra of too many companies. "Customers aren't buying anything so let's just cut heads, slash budgets, hunker down and shrink our way to greatness!" Interviewing customers to properly identify problems and opportunities and then collaborating with them to find appropriate solutions seems to be a skill set lost to an entire generation.

How did this happen?

Two major shifts drove this change. In the 50's, 60's and 70's, virtually every company had a sales force that was steeped in product knowledge, application knowledge and selling skills. The sales team was the engine, leading the charge, driving revenues. Suddenly, sales teams were deemed too expensive to maintain, and the responsibility for driving revenues shifted to the marketing department. The theory was that if we could create demand for our products and services through advertising and promotion, we merely needed to harvest the flood of incoming orders in our call centers or order desks. The second major shift was from traditional marketing to Internet marketing, providing real time global reach for our marketing messages.

But, what happens when customers stop looking and the phone stops ringing?

Both of these shifts created breakthroughs in the ability to reach greater numbers of potential customers and the ability to "tell our story" in greater depth and breadth. But these vehicles have shortcomings. First, they are "one way" vehicles, allowing the customer to learn a lot about us but enabling us to learn very little about our potential customers. This requires customers to become applications specialists, determining on their own how best to use our products and services.

The second problem is that these marketing methods virtually eliminate the ability to collaborate with our potential customers to create and deliver new and unique solutions for them. This is a critical problem in a recession, when customers simply shut down. They stop looking for new products and services, and therefore are immune to the wiles of marketing and promotion. Their focus is on cutting expenses and unless your product or service can help them do that without any investment, they simply won't pay attention. Search engine optimization is useless when potential customers stop searching.

Why we need trust more than ever

What we have lost is the very human connection that engenders trust between a company and its customers. Trust is the basis for all business transactions. We have recently seen firsthand, what a lack of trust in the banking system has done to the global economy.

As customers tune out marketing and promotions, we need a human connection to tune them back into the critical decisions they should be making to ensure that they are profitable and healthy for the long-term, and that is where a great sales force comes in. A great sales person can help customers gain a clearer understanding of their long-term goals and priorities and can collaborate in ways that no website ever could, to help customers move forward in the face of adversity and fear.

The call center doesn't cut it

As sales forces have disappeared they have been replaced by call center employees or order desk staff. These folks, while trying their best, do not have the sales and collaboration skills necessary to reach out to customers in an effective way. Nor do they have the authority or training to design and negotiate the special programs, pricing and solutions that will be necessary to get customers unstuck in the worst recession since the great depression. America has always produced the best salesmen in the world from Zig Ziglar to Jack Welch to Steven Jobs, but look at the age of these exemplars.

Most of the executives who are leading our largest corporations began their careers in sales. Many of them mistakenly believe that their people possess the same skills they possess. It is simply not true. At its zenith, Xerox put new hires through months of sales training before they ever called on a customer. In the computer, insurance, real estate, chemical, automobile, software, furniture, appliance, security and many other industries, superb sales skills were critical for career success. Yet, the sales training curriculums that built these companies have virtually disappeared.

If we don't adequately train the next generation of sales professionals, these skills and the first hand experience of the best generation of sales trainers ever, will be lost to the American business community. And just to be clear, I am not talking about teaching trickery or 101 ways to close the sale. I am talking about the ability to ask the right questions at the right time in the right way to create a sale where none would have existed without that conversation. I am talking about the ability to consistently deliver significant revenue quarter after quarter in any business climate. Companies need that skill set right now, more than ever. Can you name a single company or industry that would not benefit from better sales skills right now? How about yours?

Start recruiting immediately. If you don't have a proactive inside or outside sales team, now is the very best time to create one. You'll be able to get top talent with a bargain basement compensation package. Be sure to talk with past customers, sales managers and peers before believing everything on the resume. Have prospective sales candidates call you on the phone for an appointment to sell whatever they are selling now and then schedule a sales call with them to see their sales interviewing, presentation and collaboration skills in action. If they can't sell you, they won't sell your customers either. A strong sales person should be getting tangible results (new accounts, actively-engaged prospects or significant sales increases in existing accounts) within 60-90 days.

Hold Weekly Sales Meetings. If you aren't having weekly sales meetings, start this week. Monday morning or Friday afternoon mandatory sales meetings are critical in changing markets. The team needs to share success stories and best practices, be honest about what is not working, coordinate with marketing for better alignment, and brainstorm new ideas for getting clients unstuck. Most importantly, they need get regular practice and coaching on their sales skills. And don't forget to tell them how valuable they are to the organization. Sales people get a lot of negative feedback from prospects and clients. They need as much positive input as you can provide. They also need to know that you believe in them and value them enough to spend your time coaching and training them.

Invest in your team. Bring in a professional sales trainer to work with your team on a consistent and regular schedule.  High quality sales trainers can quickly spot shortcomings and create breakthroughs for your team. They will also provide the double espresso shot of new sales skills and motivation. One without the other is useless. Sales training done right delivers a very high return on investment. One new account or one breakthrough in methodology can often pay for a year's worth of training.

Use the same trainer consistently. It is common practice to rotate sales trainers "so the sales team doesn't get bored and to expose them to a variety of ideas" In fact, rotating trainers confuses your team since each trainer has their own approach, methodology, philosophy, skill set and language. Sales people hate "the program of the month." Sales training is NOT about entertainment. It is about skills transfer. Consistency pays because your team will learn a comprehensive set of skills and their confidence will grow as they learn. Your sales trainer will also learn more about your products, services and customers over time and that will translate into better training.

You can sell your way out of this recession and take significant market share in the process. The perfect time to charge ahead is when your competitors are retreating. You'll be controlling your own destiny and adding another potent weapon to your revenue generation arsenal. Revenue isn't at the top of the P & L by mistake. It is at the top because it is the most critical measure of your long-term viability and success.
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Rick Barrera is the co-author of Non Manipulative Selling and Collaborative Selling

Business speaker, Rick Barrera is interviewed by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce on crafting an "Overpromise" and how delivering the overpromise consistently across all customer touch-points creates ongoing customer loyalty.  

Listen to Rick Barrera's interview with the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce: http://www.ovationsolutions.com/barrera_lvcc/

Why your recruiting methods should be as unique as your brand

When Hollywood directors cast a superstar they count on two things, box office draw and the professional actors ability to act, by which I mean the ability to stop being Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlize Theron or Jim Carey and instead become the three dimensional living embodiment of someone else. Watch Capote, Monster or Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events and you will see the incredible transformations these actors make in their own personalities to literally become the character, even gaining or losing huge amounts of weight to ensure a complete and congruent representation.

Now think about your own employees, especially those who spend the most time touching customers. How willing (or capable) are they of completely transforming their bodies, minds, souls and personalities into the ideal personification of your brand?

I'm sure you would agree that most are not capable of these radical transformations and that even if they were, they would be unwilling to spend huge parts of their lives pretending to be someone they are not. Radical transformation requires enormous energy, rare talent and is highly stressful. Counting on radical transformation in each of your people is not the formula for creating consistent, positive, scalable customer experiences.

Instead let me suggest that you use a technique well known to the directors of high school musicals and local theatre companies...type casting. Type casting means that you put someone into the role who is already the character! There will be little acting required because they live and breathe the character everyday just by being themselves. Their thoughts are the characters' thoughts. Their beliefs are the characters' beliefs. Their actions are the characters' actions.

In the high school musical, for example, the prom queen is cast as the damsel in distress who mesmerizes all of the men, the school jerk is cast as the antagonist and the captain of the sports team is cast as the hero who will save the beauty. The result?  A very successful play! Why? Because very little acting is required to ensure a consistent, predictable and believable outcome.

Using type casting to hire people who will naturally reflect your brand is a simple and proven method that ensures your people will behave as the natural extension of your brand at every touch point. To be sure, hiring to your brand requires that you are already clear about your brand's positioning and have defined the brand personality you want to project in the marketplace. Let's look at how some great brand builders have used type casting to extend their brand to the front line.

Read the rest of Rick Barrera's article "Hiring to your Brand: Why your recruiting methods should be as unique as your brand" to get real world examples of companies that hire to their brand, and why it works for them.