What is your Brand Promise and why would you want one

What is your Brand Promise and why would you want one

Your Brand Promise represents what really matters to your customers and what keeps them returning year after year.
It is a short way of saying what your business uniquely does that is of significant value to the customer.
It is, exactly what it says it is. It is the promise that your brand makes to your customer. It is what they find to be of value. The challenge is that if you can’t state your Brand Promise you probably aren’t clear enough yourself of what that promise is, of how you create value for your customer.
Click here to read something I wrote last year which will help explain what I mean by your Value Proposition.
The Brand Promise triangulates with the Core Purpose and the Big Hairy Audacious Goal and when they all align we have a very cohesive and powerful philosophy.
You will recognise brand promises from the following examples.
The all time classic was FedEX’s promise to get packages to their destination by 10.00 the next morning. The slogan went something like “Absolutely positively overnight or your money back” and it revolutionised their position in the parcels market. It set clear blue water between them and everyone else.
That is the real power of a Brand Promise.
Of course, over time, this particular brand promise ceased to be unique as other companies were able to build the infrastructure that allowed them to promise to operate to similar or better levels.

Other brand promises that you might be familiar with;

Never knowingly undersold                                                                 John Lewis
The best lager in the world, probably                                                  Carlsberg
It does exactly what it says on the tin                                                 RonsealYou will probably confuse the Brand Promise with the slogan that communicates it. That may not be helpful. The slogan comes second. The thinking comes first.
Understanding what really matters to your customers and what keeps them returning year after year is not an easy question to answer. It almost certainly is not “what you do”. As someone once observed

“If Starbucks was about coffee & Bentley about transportation, they would never exist.”
Mark Twain apologised for writing a long letter with the explanation that if he had had more time he would have written a shorter one. Understanding your Brand Promise is a difficult and testing process, being able to distil it to a few easily communicable words is another, yet more difficult, exercise.
Invest the time in the thinking process, the consultation, and the searching that is needed to fully understand your brand promise before trying to sloganise it. In fact that may be a job for the marketing department to do separately so as not to confuse the two operations.
Before the slogan there needs to be a deep understanding of the customer’s real needs, and a clear understanding of the firm’s core purpose. When the two align; when they fit together like a Sudoku puzzle, then we have an effective and hopefully measurable brand promise that makes sense to our customers. If we then wordsmith that, then we have a brand promise that we might want to take public.
The best brand promises are measurable. You and your customers can measure your performance against the promise. They know what they are getting.
My brand promise is “to always provide more value than the customer is paying for”.
Like any promise the Brand Promise demands that you are able to deliver on it insistently consistently and persistently. If it were easy then everyone else would be doing it and so it wouldn’t mean much. If you fail to deliver on your promises you are untrustworthy. So the Brand Promise necessarily demands a lot of the promiser.Do you know what your brand promise is?