I always toy with whether to tip at coffee shops, $2 coffee already seems way too expensive.

At the local coffee shop, a “competitor” to Starbucks, the atmosphere makes up for the unbranded (but still expensive) coffee. The place has high ceilings, funky art (kind of), wood floors that need to be refinished, and a sofa that looks and feels like its previous stop was the boys dorm lounge of the local college.

Most visits, I drink plain old regular $2 coffee. In a mug. I never tip. But occasionally, I’ll splurge and request a cappuccino in a mug. I hesitate, inwardly, as I sign the debit card receipt: Should I add a tip?

My head screams no - I shouldn’t have spent this much money in the first place. My heart says, “Well, she doesn’t make much money making coffee in this ostensibly struggling small business. I bet she doesn’t get health insurance like the folks across the street at Starbucks.”

But my head always wins: The server is emotionally flat, barely grunts when I tell her my order, and never brings my foo-foo coffee to where I sit. There’s no real value to the service. The other day, about five minutes after I gave my order, the server essentially walked by the table where I was tapping away on my laptop and pointed back to the register, where my medium, frothy cappuccino sat: “Your drink is over there.” She wouldn’t bring it over, even though my table was on her way.

It ripped me that I had to get up and walk 7 paces to grab my cappuccino. Then I remembered that I didn’t tip her. I then asked myself, “Would she have brought me my cappuccino if I had tipped her?”

So, the question is, “If I’m the server, do I go the extra mile for only those people I think will tip me?” Or, do I serve everyone with the same level of service?

So much of, maybe all of, branding comes down to execution of the little things. It’s easy for pretty people in large conference rooms to wax on and off about branding. But branding comes down to the person on the front-line, who is or isn’t executing on the brand promise.

The person who answers the phone. The receptionist. The student who is leading your campus tours. The assistant who prints out your reports and sends them to the client. The person behind the counter at the cafeteria in the food court of your museum.

So does your assistant know how important his/her job is to the brand of your organization? Or, is she just doing “administration” work for $13 an hour?