Attended the Financial Services Forum Conference on Tuesday.  As usual an high calibre event with an impressive turnout of senior bods and some good speakers.  For those of you who specialise in Financial Services it's well worth being a member.  http://www.thefsforum.co.uk/ .  Although the subject was the changing nature of brands, many of the conversations turned to the importance of customer service.  Or the lack of it.  'Nobody manages to provide an outstanding customer experience', according to Mark Choueke, editor of Marketing Week. Which begs a question.  Are brands now more about what you do, rather than what you say? In these days of peer referencing, people don't talk about brand perceptions, they talk about brand experiences.  Perhaps it was ever thus, after all brand gurus have been enjoining us to 'mind the gap' between perception and delivery for decades.  Tuesday's discussion was a salutary reminder however, that how you behave (badly, in the case of banks) destroys trust, no matter how much you say 'Trust me because I'm big/understand you/redefining standards' etc etc.  What we trust is behaviour, not words.  And now brands are exposed, via social networks, by the people that use them, we can no longer use promotion to paper over the cracks in the actual experience.