For the caller, the agent on the other end of the phone becomes the company. They become the brand. I realized this when I was finding out about the telephone company that my brother-in-law signed up for. (Does he know never to buy from telemarketers - oops, no offense intended? Doesn't he know to ask me first, instead of second?) But anyway, he signed up over the phone and wanted me to tell him whether the company was reputable.
That turned out to be a good question. When you search Google for the official Preferred Long Distance website, you find one dead website and one pretty sick website. What you do find is a blog that says Preferred Long Distance is a SCAM! If I were Preferred Long Distance, I would invest a little time and money into making my website look reputable, even if my company wasn't.
I'm not even saying that Preferred Long Distance is a scam. What was interesting about the blog comments, as one of them pointed out, is that few people had any problem with the company.
They had a problem with the telemarketers who sold them on the company.
Imagine that: customers are basing their entire opinion of a company on people who don't even work for it. Or do they? As far as the angry customers (we always call them irate customers, I never knew why) were concerned, the telemarketers were Preferred Long Distance. Preferred Long Distance was paying the telemarketers. And unless the customers had a problem with their phones, they weren't likely to need to talk to Preferred Long Distance themselves. If the phone service was as good as claimed, ironically, they would only remember the bad service of the sales people.
Even more famous, better established companies have that branding problem. With all the millions that Hewlett Packard spends on marketing, the brand is permanently identified in my mind with the help desk reps who couldn't help me with my scanner. What if they had spent some of their millions on getting better help desk reps?
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