Is Your Brand Promise Good Enough to Matter?
The brand promise. An often underestimated holy grail of branding that you never really truly are able to understand because of its magical complexity. Understand it or not, its impact is real.
So what is a brand promise?
A brand promise is the experience or emotion that your brand commits to consistently deliver for all its interactions with your consumers.
Most brands never really proclaim their brand promise to the world, and the ones that do, well, they’re difficult to grasp or understand. Try asking your friends what the brand promise of their favorite brands are. Difficult to put into words isn’t it?
That’s because an effective brand promise is not merely a statement, but an experience. The brand promise is formed subtly through the experience people get when they interact with the brand.
When you see the logo of a restaurant an impression is formed. As soon as you open the doors and enter, another impression is formed. The way the waitress greets you and the way she smiles form yet another impression. All these impressions accumulate and funnel down into one singular identity we perceive the brand to have along with what we can expect from them consistently. This expectation becomes the promise.
This is a guide that’ll help you in creating a brand promise that can be used as an organizational compass for the people behind your brand,
As inconsistencies make your brand prone to being perceived the wrong way.
Coming up with one can be a bit tricky and time consuming. But sure enough, when you finally have a strong one, its an invaluable asset for your brand to have.
Default Expectations
When people come into contact with your brand, certain expectations are already set in their minds prior to the encounter.
When your brand promise only meets these expectations, then you have yourself a weak brand promise. Settling with a weak one is an admission to the world that your brand is just another shadow lurking behind the brands that actually matter.
The problem with most brands is that they actually do have a brand promise, it’s just that theirs fall under what people already presume in the first place — default expectations.
Default expectations are the qualities, the experience, and the results we assume based on a brand’s category, price, and identity. Preconceived standards that we already assume that a specific product or service should deliver on in the first place.
If you own a laundry shop, people expect that you deliver their clothes back clean, and so it would be silly to make your brand promise as “Keeping your clothes clean”. Well, duh! That’s exactly what anyone would expect from a laundry shop in the first place.
If you own a restaurant, it is assumed that the food you serve is clean. It is what it should be — a basic requirement, automatic, expected. So imagine telling your customers “You are guaranteed that the food is clean”. That just gives off a lot of red flags. Of course the food should be clean.
Mercedes-Benz on the other hand produce cars that are pricey — very pricey. But buyers never really complain about the price because although they are expensive, buyers expect nothing but the best materials to be used. They even reinforce this with their tag-line “the best or nothing”. What makes Mercedes-Benz great is that they consistently break these expectations.
Create a brand promise that goes beyond preconceived standards, then exceed those expectations.
4 Step Process for Developing Your Brand Promise
- Identify the default expectations of your consumers with the category/industry your brand is in. Make sure that your brand promise exceeds these basic expectations.
- Determine how your brand is different from its competitors.
- Identify your brand’s values, beliefs, and purpose.
- Basing on your brand’s values, beliefs and purpose, what emotion will your consumers feel with your brand that they won’t feel with others? What experience will they have with your brand that they won’t have with others?
Conclusion
Remember, a brand promise that is just written and spoken has no value. It only becomes gold through consistent implementation.
The feeling and experience you deliver consistently becomes the promise.
You know you have a strong one when your consumers can’t really seem to put the feeling into words. They somehow just get that gut feel that choosing you “just feels right”.
Promises are meant to be broken but great brands don’t break theirs. Wish you luck on your path to greatness.
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