Is Your Brand Iconic?

What You’ll Learn

Bryan Rader discusses what it means for a brand to be “iconic” and how broadband providers can take steps in that direction.

Guest Speaker

Bryan Rader

Show Notes

Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Intro: A production of Pioneer Utility Resources. StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers.

Andy Johns: What does it mean to be iconic, and how can broadband providers get there? That’s what we’re going to talk about in this episode of StoryConnect: The Podcast. My name is Andy Johns, your host with Pioneer, and I’m joined on this episode by Bryan Rader, who is the president of MDU for Pavlov Media. Bryan, thanks for joining me.

Bryan Rader: Andy, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Andy Johns: Now, we’ll talk a little bit more about Pavlov and your role there, kind of what you guys are doing. But first I wanted to get into the topic. I thought it was really interesting in the latest issue of Broadband Communities magazine. You had a column in there where you asked the question, the headline, “Is your organization iconic?” You referred to the book by Scott McKain titled “Iconic,” which I have added to my list on Goodreads to get into. But, let’s go ahead and start right there. What does it mean for an organization, particularly a broadband provider, to be iconic?

Bryan Rader: So that’s a great place to start. You know, when we think about the broadband industry and, you know, more broadly, the cable TV industry, which got into broadband many years ago, our customer satisfaction scores as an industry are terrible. And that’s been a reality for many, many years. University of Michigan customer satisfaction studies have not given us good ratings. The big companies in our industry have not scored well. The smaller companies have not scored well. More recently, those numbers have gotten better, but our customers’ expectations have also increased over the last decade. So we’re chasing a tail and having a hard time catching it. And I’m speaking about the industry more broadly. We fell in love with the book “Iconic” because it set a North Star for service providers to begin to achieve something special. And in the book, he covers four different stages of becoming iconic. But what I like most about the book was that it gave a direction for ISPs, or managed service providers, to achieve a level of customer experience, customer satisfaction that doesn’t happen historically in this industry. And so the question I raised in the article is, you know, there are very few companies that ever truly achieve becoming iconic. [inaudible] Indianapolis, he brings up a resort in Arizona and mentions companies at one time or another, like Southwest Airlines, who achieved iconic status. I’m not sure they’ve achieved that today, but they’ve been there before. Apple, Starbucks, to name a few. Nike, another example. And the question we had is, can anybody in our industry get to that level of becoming iconic as a customer service organization? And is that possible for someone in the broadband industry to achieve that? So that was really what drew me to the topic.

Andy Johns: Yeah. And you mentioned those companies. And when I think of iconic companies, you know, it’s a lot of those you mentioned: Nike, Coca-Cola, you know, some of the true icons out there. But a company doesn’t necessarily have to be everywhere and, you know, multi, multi billion dollar companies to be iconic. You don’t have to be on every street corner like a Starbucks in a big city or somewhere like that. It can be on a much smaller scale, but still be iconic and your niche, right?

Bryan Rader: That’s right. And I think there to that end, it’s important to understand the difference between customer satisfaction and customer dissatisfaction. And quite often it’s not driven by having multi-billion dollar enterprises to support that effort. In fact, the effort doesn’t always require capital. It’s the culture. It’s what your priorities are as an organization. And what happens when you don’t satisfy a customer, how does the organization respond?

Andy Johns: And that’s a really good point because, you know, the data is out there. I’ve seen it before, where, you know, when you do have an outage, when you do have a problem, that if you solve it the right way, then your customers are even more tightly bonded to you after that because they’ve appreciated how well you handled it. So I’m glad you brought that up, that it’s not just the initial customer service, but also to take that approach to be iconic when things go wrong can be a big part of it as well.

Bryan Rader: Absolutely. And I think, you know, in the book, he talks about the four stages. We happen to live in an industry that is really in the first stage, which is sameness. And sameness is this concept of we’re selling access to the Internet. And a lot of providers look at their business as just providing access to the Internet. And you pay $70 a month. You get X speed. Download might be this, upload might be that. And if you want greater speed, you pay for it, and don’t call us. And you know, that’s the relationship. That’s what I call level one, and that’s not good enough. That’s sameness.

Andy Johns: Very, very transactional kind of approach to it.

Bryan Rader: Absolutely. And you know, in some parts of our industry, for many, many years that worked. But our customer today doesn’t accept sameness. And the companies that only achieve sameness won’t last very long. And I think that’s the challenge that they’ll face. The second level he talks about is differentiation. And differentiation comes in a variety of different ways. It can be the speed at which you connect your customer. It can be the level of support. Having a Wi-Fi device in the customer’s home for single family or in our case, a multifamily, having managed Wi-Fi and doing that. Because the connection isn’t just at the outlet; it’s at the device. And our customers are so mobile that it really comes down more to Wi-Fi than to just the connectivity. And then the third tier is differentiation. I’m sorry, distinction. And distinct is very hard to achieve. It’s not just having a speed and a price and doing an install on time. It’s being visible, accessible, accommodative, proactive with your customer. it’s doing a variety of things. Maybe it’s training the customer when they buy a new device or having access to train your customer. I think in some cases, we’re working as an example on having QR codes so our customer can access a live person immediately.

Bryan Rader: I love the idea of one day having, rather than an 800 number with a call center that answers phones and you just go into the queue. I love the idea of being able to have a one touch button that takes you to a video concierge who can support your Internet connectivity issues in a way that is actually going to support your experience. And a lot of our customers, when they have issues, and I’m speaking broadly about broadband customers, it’s a customer issue. It’s an education issue. It may not be a service provider issue. And so how we interact with the customer, whether it’s text, chat, by phone or by video call, which I think is a great way to create distinction, is an area of opportunity for all of us. And then that fourth level is where you have such loyalty that your brand actually stands for something that even transcends the broadband industry. And, as you said, you know, Southwest Airlines, Coca-Cola, Nike, Starbucks, when you hear these brands, there’s something you think about that’s unique not to their product category, but it actually transcends their product category. And so we look at that as the final layer of creating, of optimizing customer satisfaction.

Andy Johns: Yeah. And I’d like to talk more about that level four in a second. But to go back to level three, because I think that, you know, in the column that you wrote in the magazine, you mentioned some of the things, and there are some of the words that that I’ve heard folks in our industry use. You know, you mentioned creating an environment of trust, transparency, responsiveness, visibility, focus. You know, all those are good things. Obviously along the way, it can help build some of that distinction. And you know, from reading your column from this discussion, you know, even to get to that level three, it goes a lot, it goes much farther than just having, like you said, a great product and then having a great ad campaign. I mean for somebody even to get to level three, much less level four, it really kind of has to seep into the culture of the company and go really beyond anything that anybody is going to, you know, run on an ad or come up with a great slogan. It’s got to run really deep, it sounds like.

Bryan Rader: It has to run deep. It has to be authentic and genuine. And I saw a fiber to the home provider recently published a picture of the very first customer they ever installed a year ago, and they brought 18 staff members to this customer’s home to celebrate it. And they came back one year later and did it again. And I think that genuine affection for your consumer has to go beyond the sales person, beyond the marketing campaign. It has to be real. What happens during a Super Bowl if you have an Internet outage? What happens on Friday night after five when there’s an issue on the network? Does somebody contact the customer proactively, or do you send a broadcast email or a text? Or only wait for the customer to call and complain? Those are things that are different approaches to how we manage [inaudible] consumer.

Andy Johns: Yeah. So tell me a little bit about, you know, Pavlov Media. I don’t know where you feel like you guys are on that scale. And let’s talk about maybe some things that you guys do to, if not get you all the way to iconic, then at least move you down the line. And then we can get into what you’ve seen some other ISPs do to head in that direction. But kind of outline for us a little bit about what you guys do and kind of where you would put yourself and why on that scale.

Bryan Rader: Pavlov Media has been around for around 30 years. Our focus has always been on the multifamily industry, which got the redheaded stepchild service traditionally from the cable and internet providers. It’s a very different business. And so we saw an opportunity to be specialists in an industry full of generalists. And so we really built our focus in launching managed Wi-Fi services in multifamily buildings nationwide. Our focus is on student housing and traditional apartment communities. And we’re heavy in Sunbelt areas, Florida to Texas, to Arizona and many Midwest markets as well. We also have a fiber to the home model, and we are building infrastructure in rural areas that are adjacent to some of the multifamily markets that we operate in. For us to be iconic, it’s a very interesting question, and it’s one that we’ve taken to our team and said, “How can we challenge ourselves to get to that level?” I think in our business, as I said earlier, a lot of ISPs are sameness. They think about themselves as utilities. My customer has to have it. As long as it works, everybody’s happy. But that’s that’s not unique. You can’t survive on that model because that’s not right. Things do happen whether you created it or your customer creates it, there will be service interruptions. So we looked at it and looked at the landscape and said, “Where are we on that level of sameness versus iconic?” And we see a lot of differentiation in our model. We think we are doing a great job of creating differentiation. And today we feel like we are distinct, but we also believe that our competition is always getting stronger, and we want to get to the ultimate, the ultimate level. So some of the things we’re looking at now is, is we’re an organization that’s growing quite quickly now. How do you continue to drive your culture when you’re growing by 50 to 100% over the next couple of years in terms of staff? And that’s a challenge that we see. How do your customers perceive you as you’re growing? And how do you continue to outwork your competition and providing excellent customer service? So we’re looking for unique ways to become iconic. We want to identify service interruptions before they happen. But if they happen, we want to get in touch with our customer immediately after to make sure that all the lights came back on, that everything’s working properly. We want to check on our customers. We want to be visible at every location along the way. And those are some of the things that we’re working on today. The definition of being iconic is not defined by the broadband provider. It’s defined by the broadband customer. And when you ask an unhappy broadband customer why are you unhappy, they don’t see value in the product. They think you’re invisible. They are tired of these service interruptions. They think you don’t care, and they will switch to another provider when those things happen. We have identified those touchpoints, and we are resourcing to solve for those for the long term in ways that delight the customer, not just achieve what the customer is asking. We want to go way above and beyond that. And we track it with net promoter scores. We track it with unhappy customers that call us with a problem. And we track it on on a normalized basis with customers on a, you know, just a regular occurrence in experiencing our product.

Andy Johns: Sure. Well said. Are there folks in the broadband provider space – and I know you said at the beginning, you know, that it is an industry that particularly looking at some of the big national brands, it’s near the bottom of the barrel with some of those overall satisfaction scores. Are there folks – you know, when I think through, you know, what brands are iconic, you know, I can think of some individual things. You know, we’ve done podcast episodes with folks that went so far as to when they got out of the TV business. They were, you know, connecting antennas on houses of their co-op members because they wanted them to keep the TV service. We’ve, you know, we had a recent episode about somebody who’s got an ice cream truck they drive around the neighborhoods giving out ice cream to, you know, the areas they serve. I mean, there’s some folks doing some really cool things. But no single thing like that is enough to make a brand iconic, I think you would agree. Is there anybody that you’ve seen, even going back a few years, in the fiber space that you feel like that has been, or is, iconic at one point or another?

Bryan Rader: I think there’s only one example that we point to, and it was short lived, but it is worth mentioning. And that is when Google Fiber went through a process of 500 cities applying to be the first fiber hood, and they generated an incredible amount of enthusiasm in Kansas City in 2012 and 2013, when they launched Google Fiber. They had a retail store. The energy in the local market, the civic pride, there was a real affection for Google Fiber. There was pride in Kansas City for being first. And I think for a moment, there was [inaudible] I would call that iconic performance in our industry. Having said that, it was short lived. When they moved to other markets over time, they didn’t bring that same passion or energy or desire to satisfy the customer in the same way that they did in the first market. So I would say it wasn’t sustainable. It’s possible that it wasn’t their core competency and maybe they weren’t resourcing it properly as they grew the model beyond Kansas City. But for that brief moment in the first 18 months, I would call that the closest example to iconic status I’ve seen in the broadband space thus far.

Andy Johns: Yeah, that was certainly, like you said, short lived. But you’re right, that was a point in time when you can say that was somebody that differentiated themselves that, you know, certainly seemed like kind of a different approach there. Last question for you, if there’s a broadband provider out there, or really any organization out there and wherever they are, whether they’re stuck in that first phase with a lot of sameness or maybe they’re even on the second or third level, what’s some advice that you might have for them if trying to get there, if not all the way to iconic status, then at least making some progress in that direction. What advice would you have for those folks?

Bryan Rader: My suggestion would be to get out in front and talk to your customers and have a lot of your staff talk to your customers. Don’t let it just be the director of marketing or the customer service manager. I think you have to get much broader within your organization. Let the customer guide you to what iconic means in your market and talk to your competitors’ customers, both satisfied and unsatisfied customers. As I said earlier, you know, the definition of iconic can’t be defined by the broadband provider. It has to be defined by your customer. And I think listening to them is critical. Doing a customer satisfaction survey or a scorecard is just not enough. You have to listen to what it truly means to be iconic and to get to that level of uniqueness. And then sit back and say, “How can I resource properly to capture that objective?” And look for an ROI analysis in doing so. We believe in our business that it makes sense to do this and that becoming iconic has to be your North Star, has to be our North Star in our business, and I think every company should be pursuing that. If you only pursue differentiation, which is better than sameness, you won’t last very long. It’s not hard for a competitor to lap you and perform better than you, if that’s your only goal.

Andy Johns: Well said. I appreciate that, and I appreciate the insights and for you sharing those with us here on this episode. Thanks, Bryan.

Bryan Rader: Thanks, Andy. Really appreciate it.

Andy Johns: He is Bryan Rader. He is the president of MDU for Pavlov Media. His column appeared in the Broadband Communities magazine issue of July of 2023. And the book he referenced in there was iconic by Scott McKain. So good resources all the way around for you there. My name is Andy Johns, your host with Pioneer. And until we talk again, keep telling your story.

Outro: StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share your story. StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.