A strong brand promise is one that connects your purpose, your positioning, your methodology, your people and your customer experience. It enables you to deliver your brand in a way that will connect emotional with your ideal clients and makes your brand authentic to you. If you, your team and business connections believe in your brand promise and deliver it every time, you will gain trust and your business will grow and not just through referrals!
Factors to consider when creating a brand promise:
- It must be clear and consistent: First, the promise should be simple and relate to your target audience. Secondly, keep to your promise – don’t keep mixing it up across different social media platforms.
- It has to be distinctive and memorable: It’s got to be real! It can be catchy, short and sweet, but most importantly how will it differ you from other brand promises. How will you stand out from the crowd in a packed market place.
- It must be believable and measurable: Most importantly don’t make promises you can’t keep. It should be relevant to your target audience and meet their expectations. Make sure it’s a promise you can deliver consistently.
- Carefully consider how you communicate it: Remember actions speak louder than words. You can spread your brand promise across so many social media platforms today as well as implement it into tag lines, but if you don’t deliver on it, you are failing your clients as well as failing yourself!
So, how do you define your brand promise
I have the brand promise daisy chain, Ask yourself the following:
1) What is your purpose?
2) Where do you want to position your brand in the market?
3) What does it say about you and your people?
4) What makes you unique?
5) And most importantly, how do you want your customers to feel about your product / service?
Example for “Your People”
For instance, a great example of this is John Lewis. They defined their brand promise back in 1925 as “Never knowingly undersold†and today they still deliver their promise. By training and involving their staff in the business partnership to consistently deliver their unique brand promise, the staff are valued and benefit yearly from a share from the profits. This making them superior to many other department stores and delivering a high quality customer experience too!
Quote from John Lewis “Our founder’s vision of a successful business powered by its people and its principles defines our unique company today. The profits and benefits created by our success are shared by all our Partners.”
Here are some more examples of well known and highly regarded brands across the sectors and their promises to us, the consumers.
BMW: “The Ultimate Driving Machine”
This bold statement is the driving force behind BMW’s brand. They aim to produce only the most efficient and elegant vehicles and their brand promise states this with confidence.
Nike: To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.
This brand promise doesn’t even mention Nike products. Instead it tells the consumer how they think, what they aim to do on a much larger scale than just sports clothing and equipment.
Example of a Broken Brand Promises
Well I bet you can name and shame just a few Tesco make billions every year and recently created seven new private-label brands based on fictional farm names, which replaced its Everyday Value brand. The products come under the categories of fresh produce, meat and poultry. Their packaging features colour codes and farm names such as Willow, Boswell Farms and Woodside.
This creates the illusion that they are supporting British farms and are sourcing their range Locally but the reality is that the produce is sourced from Spain, Israel and Netherlands etc! Only a small percentage were produced from this country. In my opinion, this is miss-leading the consumer into thinking that they are supporting local farmers!
So remember; make it, keep it, deliver it – consistently
