ADVISORY/Undelivered Brand Promise Costs Corporations Millions; The Forum Corporation Helps Companies Turn Promise to Practice

Business Wire, July 18, 2001

Business Editors

ADVISORY...

--(BUSINESS WIRE)

What: Historically, marketers have focused on four marketing

points - product, price, promotion and place. However, these

traditional marketing components do not differentiate some

companies. The Forum Corporation has found that people and the

promise of the brand are the true company differentiators in

highly competitive industries.

One of the world's leading companies has found that it loses

millions of dollars annually due to employees that disappoint

customers by not living the company's brand promise. After

years of increasing customer complaints, the corporate senior

management is just beginning to address the issue with the

commitment to change employees' behavior so that they will

consistently deliver the company's brand promise.

This issue is more common than companies like to admit, and

much more pronounced during economic downturns. For seven

years, Forum Corporation has worked with Fortune 500 and other

leading-edge companies on how to positively impact the bottom

line by living the brand promise. Forum has found that the

commitment of senior leadership to enable the organization to

deliver the brand promise is required for a positive shift to

occur.

Currently, Forum is engaged in a broad research study that

will identify the best practices employed to design, develop

and implement outstanding customer experience. The result will

be an assessment tool for companies to benchmark and measure

customer experience. The research is due out later this year,

with a book to follow in Spring/Summer 2002.

Who: Peter Pickus, senior vice president of the Customer

Experience business at The Forum Corporation, can address the

issues and concerns regarding customer service and experience,

including:

-- Aligning company employees to a company's brand

-- Creating and implementing a company's brand promise

-- Initial insights into Forum's current customer experience research project

Peter provides strategic direction for large-scale Customer

Experience business projects and works with clients to help build

business through sales, people development, and the refinement of

processes and protocols. Previously, Peter served as a

consultant, senior consultant, and vice president in the Customer

Experience business before his promotion to senior vice

president. Peter holds a Master of Business Administration with

High Distinction from the University of Michigan. He has been

published in Human Resource Executive and coauthored a chapter in

the book, "Tomorrow's Human Resource Management."