The Ritz-Carlton has understood this for a long time.  They know that any nice hotel room is pretty much the same.  It’s a bed and four walls.  What matters is what happens outside the room.  That’s the service.

They also know that service is easy when things are going well.  It’s not that hard to check you in and out, valet the car and deliver your luggage.  What makes the difference is how things are handled when things aren’t going well.

It doesn’t matter if you need a reservation to a restaurant, a special delivery or have an issue with a noisy neighbor.  What ever the problem is, The Ritz has realized they can distinguish themselves as one of the best hotel chains by fixing it and fixing it well.

The Ritz has a customer service policy that borders on amazing.  If a customer has a request, the employee they tell about it must see that it is closed.  They own that interaction beginning to end.  No one gets to say “that isn’t my job” or “here’s the person to call.” They do it.  They have to.

Any business can learn from this.  Your customers want their problem fixed, what ever it is.  They don’t care who does it for them.  When they get shuffled around they lose faith that the issue will be solve.  Empower people to make it right, and it will get better.

There’s the famous Nordstrom story about the woman who returned a tire there even though they don’t sell tires.  Charlie Trotter has told a story about ordering a steak from a nearby restaurant to serve to a customer who wanted one, even though he didn’t have one on hand.  Fix a problem and you can build a loyal customer.  How would you have liked to have your business mentioned as one of these service leaders?  It’s a viral marketing buzz that’s hard to beat.   Anyone care to share a comment on a great experience?

Why would a brand this strong risk reintroducing itself as “G”?  Why would it change its formula to include vitamins?  Why would it retool its entire line to feature odd text like “bring it” and ditch almost all graphics?

The answer in short is that it is now reacting to an emerging competitor, vitamin water.  While I don’t have data to support this, I have to imagine that the distribution force of Coke combined with their brand endorsements have started to take significant market share.

Gatorade is now starting to look and act a lot like their #2 competitor, and that might be a really bad move.

Moves like this are the “rock and a hard place” for brands.  If they do nothing, vitaminwater will continue to steal their share.  If they change, they lose much of the advantage they held with their brand heritage.  The normal strategy here is to innovate, but line extensions like Propel and G2 seem only moderately well adopted.

I do think the Gatorade team has done one very significant innovation they have failed to leverage, at least to my knowledge.  They launched a line for performance athletes called Gatorade Elite.  Done right, this could be a “halo” that could further their reputation as the experts in serving athletes.  Done wrong, it will collect dust on the shelves at Gold’s Gym.  I’m far from the target here, so I don’t know much about distribution.  In fact the first I had heard about it was in researching this post.

We all wanted to be like mike, so why not take that to the next level with Gatorade Elite?