More important, our research emphasizes the value of
going beyond image-building endeavors to establishing real
relationships between the company and customers.
Customers crave audience with the people behind the brands.
The ethnographic evidence for this observation is staggering.
At Camp Jeep, the engineering roundtables consistently drew
maximum-capacity participation. At Harley-Davidson brandfests,
where intense corporate interaction with customers is
made policy, some corporate officers have achieved celebrity
status and occasionally are swamped by requests for photographs
or signatures. Brandon J., an employee who routinely
travels to attend the company’s events, has developed
friendships with people from coast to coast who seek him out
at events to chat or for after-hours socializing. Employees
can provide customers a human manifestation of the company
at a time when many corporations are perceived as
impersonal and unfeeling bureaucracies.