Christina Garnett is a recognized authority on CX with a focus on cultivating “brandoms” and the author of “Transforming Customer Brand Relationships”.
In the classic 1976 movie “Network”, TV news anchor Howard Beale urges his viewing audience to shout at the top of their lungs, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”.
Beale’s soliloquy leading up to that exhortation was all about the helplessness people feel in the face of excessive corporate power and the dehumanization of society. He might as well have been vocalizing the suppressed rage that many people feel today. Fifty years after that movie was made, people are in exactly the same frame of mind – feeling left behind at a time of growing wealth disparity – beaten down by the daily mistreatment they get as customers – victimized by a system that is not serving them well. People feel taken for granted. They are disillusioned. They feel disenfranchised. And they are angry about it.
According to the most recent American Customer Rage Survey, the marketplace has become a “combat zone”. The authors of the report say, “What we are witnessing is not just an epidemic of fuming customers, but the dawn of a broader, more seismic shift – a new era of broader and more diversified marketplace conflict”.
Complaints about poor service are way up: 77% of customers have experienced a product or service problem in the past year (it was only 32% when “Network” was made). And 64% of those customers feel rage over it. No wonder! Even if you can find a phone number to report a problem these days, good luck getting it resolved without having to go to extraordinary lengths. Customer rage bubbles up like volcanic lava through social media channels – takes the form of boycotts against brands judged to be villains – manifests itself in uncivil behaviour toward store clerks.
Yet most brands today cling to this Pollyanna ambition of building harmonious customer relationships even as they turn a blind eye to the simmering resentment people feel. While most brands have made it easier than ever to buy their products, they have also made it harder than ever to get decent service. Brand marketers are not directly to blame – their job begins and ends with selling stuff – but the companies they work for are certainly culpable. Because companies look at the post-sale treatment of customers as overhead. A cost of doing business. So they exert minimum effort to keep customers happy. Their goal is to automate the experience, involving as few humans as possible. In doing so, they are dehumanizing it, stripping it of empathy and care.
If customers feel brands don’t care about them, how can brands ever hope to earn their trust and loyalty? The answer, according to CX evangelist Christina Garnett, is to treat customers “as partners, not just consumers”. Which means making customers feel valued. Giving them the recognition and support they deserve. Fostering a sense of “we’re in this together”. And most importantly, proving that the brand has “their back”.
None of that is possible if brands rely solely on “look at me” messaging to drive engagement. That only comes across as selling by another name. To bridge this chasm between brand marketing and CX, a relationship playbook is needed which lays out a pathway to forming a genuine emotional connection with customers.
In her book “Transforming Customer-Brand Relationships”, Christina serves up a compendium of best practices around building a more humanistic brand through community building and social listening. Long lasting relationships are only possible, she believes, if brands create “brandoms” that customers want to belong to – places they can meet and feel connected to each other. The brand is an enabler and not a manipulator, fuelling the conversation, facilitating meaningful interactions and meet-ups.
I started by asking Christina about her journey from undergrad English Lit major and math teacher to customer evangelist.
Christina Garnett: So I am multi-passionate, which makes sense now, but not something that I even knew was a thing if it was kind of like common terminology when I was in college. But I’ve always loved the canon, I’ve always loved classic literature. And so I was the first person to major. Like you have to go through, like you have to take a certain class in order to major for each specific discipline. And I took the class as soon as I knew that I had the grade required in order to like, be blessed essentially by Davidson College. I immediately knew who I wanted to be my advisor – I immediately walked up to his office and was like, here we go, just go ahead and let me have it.
And so I always knew that I wanted to do that. I loved reading. It’s my one, it’s the one true love of my life, apart from my husband, is reading, and books, and novels essentially. And like most classic English majors, I wanted to write the next great American novel. I’m actually working on a novel now because I can’t shut that brain off. That part of my brain, it just has to keep, keep going. When I graduated college I originally started college as a law, as a pre-law and I’d wanted to go into law for a very long time. And then around like my sophomore year I figured out that I just really liked Law and Order, not actually law, which is very different. And so it became very clear to me that wasn’t what I wanted to do.
And so I thought about teaching and, like, what could that be? Because I did a lot of, like, volunteering in college working with other students. And I loved it. It felt natural to me. And so I went to, was up for a couple positions, after I graduated and they were all private schools, and it was taking a little bit longer because they can kind of like, they’re at their own leisure. Like, if school starts tomorrow, they’re like, all right, you’re hired. You can just show up and get going. And I’m too much Type A for that. So I went to a job fair in Hickory. I went to school in Davidson. And so I went to a job fair in Hickory, which is like an hour away, 45 minutes, an hour away. And went to see kind of like what public school positions were available.
And while I was there, um, you have to wear a name tag that says, like, your name, where you went to school and what your degree was in. So it was like, Christina, Davidson, English. And while I was there, a couple, like, two different principals came up to me that needed a math teacher. But they saw Davidson, they’re like, you must be smart. How are you at math? And I was like, I took everything through calculus, like, it’s fine. I don’t love it, but like, I’m good at it, it’s fine. And so wound up actually getting a job at Forbush High School outside of Winston Salem for math, and taught Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, 1A, 1B, and loved it. But there was a lot of problems with public school that I didn’t like, not that school, but like, the public school system as like a whole construct.
And then wound up getting a position in Charlotte for a school, um, teaching math and history at a school for students with learning differences. And so I taught there for two years, was absolutely loved it. And that honestly later on became a thing where it was like, I, I’m a firm believer that market, that teachers make the best marketers because a good teacher will do differentiated instruction. They understand that you’re not. There’s not one way to teach to everybody. And good marketers do the same thing. Like, they essentially do differentiated instruction. It’s just not called that. And so, was there for two years, then went to another private school, taught math for two years there, and then met my husband, moved to Virginia, had to figure out if I wanted to teach again or if I wanted to kind of like do something else. Was a stay at home mom for a few years while I kind of pondered what that looked like.
And I found marketing. I found HubSpot Academy and started, I’m one of those people, like, there’s not a single rabbit hole I haven’t like, done the whole journey in. And so I read everything I could get. If there was an online course, I took it. If there was a YouTube tutorial, I watched it. I just absorbed absolutely everything I could get my hands on. And inbound marketing made a lot of sense to me.
Stephen Shaw: So what led you to HubSpot to begin with? Like the academy, I mean.