I’m not referring to a brand as a logo and a typeface. I’m referring to the new kind of brand, the one is formed by the entire experience of a customer’s interaction. That experience gets branded into his or her memory and leaks into the buzz of modern culture. If you can’t make a good customer experience from start to finish, you’ve failed to generate brand value that will attract customers to come back for repeat business and tell their friends to come back, too. That’s how good customer experience directly affects the bottom line.

Increasingly bad customer experience seems to be a leading indicator of decreasing revenue. We saw this effect at Circuit City, when a new CEO fired every expert sales associate in the organization and hired new, cheaper, inexperienced ones who didn’t know what they were doing. Customers left the stores with incorrect information or with their questions unanswered. They went to Best Buy instead.

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