the Insight Inn

I am seeing a lot more marketing campaigns featuring employees lately. Are you?

Whether it’s those wonky Wendy’s staffers, or the white-aproned Progressive crew, or overly-enthused Discover card customer service agents, or polo-shirtted “Lily” from AT&T, or Jake from State Farm popping up ad nauseam, these campaigns generally utilize extremely-engaged employees as the basis for campaigns.

Perhaps all these employee-based campaigns are an extension of the plethora of employee-recruitment and retention (employer brand) ad campaigns that were so crucial during and after the pandemic. Or perhaps this is simply a result of brands hoping for ‘slam-dunk’ brand recognition, where little else has to be done to achieve a high awareness score if an employee with a uniform is onscreen the entire time.

There’s only one difficulty with this— when a brand bases its communications on this… BUT consumers find it hard to find actual help when they need it during a customer experience with said brand.

In that scenario, that brand might have just unintentionally pointed out a heck of a gap between fiction and reality.

In the fictionalized, alternate-reality presented by these employee-based ad campaigns, the company’s employees are SO fanatically committed to the brand, and its products or services, that it’s of COURSE seen as hyperbolic— I’m not saying that people take advertising literally.

I AM saying the gap between the two can set them up for some level of disappointment. ‘Enthusiastic employee’ campaigns could easily make any half-hearted, low-energy interaction with real-life employees seem even more irritating by comparison.

In my previous Marketing Paradox Mondays article, I talked about how consumers are increasingly growing frustrated with the lack of help and assistance in their in-person retail and restaurant experiences.

In this article, I’ll contrast those feelings with the ad campaigns featuring peppy, engaged employees, who go out of their way to assist people— and the discrepancy between THAT and the customer experience in the real world.

Marketing Paradox Mondays #21— If You Feature Employees in Campaigns, Consumers Might Be More Likely to Notice a Lackluster Customer Experience

Even as companies have been slashing staffing levels, further automating, lowering pay, and looking for ‘cheaper’ means to provide service (chat bots, or AI, anyone?)—perhaps companies have also realized they want to ‘make up’ for this lack of employee engagement via a marketing promise.

It’s truly whiplash-inducing that while operationally, companies seem to be pulling way back on their investment in ‘human capital,’ we seem to be in this ‘golden age’ of “Employee Appreciation Campaigns.”

I don’t tend to like using LinkedIn posts as a venue to talk harshly about a specific brand, or to complain about a singular customer service experience, as that “focus group of one” may or may not be fair to that company. But the below circumstance was such a glaring illustration of the yawning gap between the alternate reality of employee campaigns and ACTUAL real life, I couldn’t help but use it here for illustrative purposes.

The other day, I wandered into a very large, urban Bank of America branch. It was located very near a downtown of a major market, and it was… clearly empty. The kind of silence greeted me that made me wonder if I should yell, “Hello?” — as after a few minutes, I was still the only soul standing in the building that contained 10 different teller windows, with 30-foot ceilings.

While I stood waiting, I noticed that all around me were images of grinning employees, printed on standees. They were smiling, helpful, apparently stoked to help me with my banking needs.…and were… real? Well, at least, the captions said they were real employees, displaying their title and the branch these employees served at in other cities.

They just weren’t located at THIS branch, I mused.

Then, a door opened and an employee emerged: one person was staffing this huge bank.

I asked her if she was working by herself, pointing out the smiling employee photos plastered at every (very empty) window. “Yeah, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? My boss went on vacation and left me in charge of this branch, so I’m working by myself for the next 3 weeks.”

I tried to transact quickly, as a pile-up of customers was beginning to start a line behind me. I couldn’t help but think about how this flesh-and-blood employee had a legion of silent cardboard standee ‘coworkers’ all around her— none of whom could actually help her, or customers.

The above contrast is why these over-enthusiastic, beaming faces in employee-based ads can border on cartoonish— especially when people are well aware that these jobs have been operationalized very differently by employers over the years.

Marketing that features employees doesn’t make up for the lack of customer service that most brands offer as they cut operational costs and cut back on human talent. Instead, I argue it can draw even more attention to the dearth of help being offered to people— in a severely understaffed retail environment, branch, or restaurant, it could even feel a little like gaslighting.

I’ll attach a few photos of the Bank of America employee campaign in the comments, so you can see the campaign that I saw in the branch that day (snapped them with my iPhone).

My sincere hope is that consumers are getting interactions with a beaming Lily, a Jake, or a Flo when they interact with companies they need products or services from— but based on talking with people in my qualitative research studies, I’m guessing not.

What do you think of the use of employee-based ad campaigns, and how they might or might not impact customers and their experience? I’d love to hear your take.

(Oh, and don’t forget to peep that Bank of America employee campaign— more photos posted in the comments of the empty bank and smiling standees).