The insides of companies always leak out, the Co-op story

It might takes days, months or sometimes years, but it is inevitable; if the culture or the internal processes of a company are bad it will eventually leak to customers.

The key is seeing it coming.

In the summer of 2011 we presented the results of our Brand Alignment Monitor (BAM) at an Institute of finance conference in London. The BAM is based on the Net Promoter Score and measures how well brands are delivered through all customer touch points and diagnoses what is and isn’t working. It takes measures from customers, the market in general and, crucially, the people who work for the brands themselves. The results, for the financial sector were not pretty.

As you can imagine we were listened to in stony silence as we went through the brutal truths for the sector but the real gasps came when we reached the Cooperative. They had the most positive BAM scores amongst their customers and the market in general but the telling thing was that the BAM scores amongst staff were the worst, by far, in the market. The dominant feeling was that the
Co-op was ‘bad’ and we predicted a sticky end.

It took two years for it to show but, like we always say, the insides of companies always leak out.