Definition: A Brand Promise is a statement from the brand owner to customers, which identifies what consumers should expect from all interactions with the brand. Interactions may include employees, representatives, actual service or product quality or performance, communication etc. The brand promise is often strongly associated with the brand owner’s name and/or logo.  Some brands express their brand promise in a tag line, while others develop their brand promise into a detailed statement on the values, characteristics and behaviour of their brand.

A brand is a wonderful and highly complex thing.  Each year, businesses from Tokyo to London to some small town along the Alaskan coast collectively pour billions upon billions of dollars into building their brands, creating and maintaining the desired image and positioning in the mind of the consumer, and integrating these with all the other puzzle pieces that comprise the brand promise.  As all the pieces are fitted together, the brand comes alive and screams to the masses, “Here is what I can do for you, and why I can do it better than anyone else.”  It is Nike’s “Just do it,” Gatorade’s “Is it in you?,” Motel 6’s “We’ll leave the light on for you,” and Nordstrom’s commitment to customer service, but it is also all the personal, sentimental reasons you have for choosing, say, a Coca-Cola rather than a Pepsi, or vice versa.  It is what the brands stands for in the marketplace, and it sets the stage for what each individual customer should expect at every encounter with the brand.  Call it a tag line, a slogan, a statement of values, the “social side” of the brand, or whatever else you like – the reality is that it is so much more than that.  This message – and all that it represents  -  is the essence of the brand promise, and it is that promise that we Marketers rely upon to drive business to our brand rather than the competition.  It is not necessary to scream your brand promise the loudest, but it is necessary to deliver on it the most consistently. The brand promise must be relevant, and it must be compelling to your target customers, but it must also be achievable every time someone interacts with your brand.  That isn’t to say that the promise will be achieved every time, but the possibility of achieving it needs to be there in every instance.  Moreover, as the percentage of times you do fulfill the brand promise increases, in all likelihood your chances of having a successful brand and business will also increase.  Often times, Marketers get so wrapped up in the intricacies of designing the brand promise that they forget this extremely important executional piece of the puzzle.  If you overpromise, or if the actual product or service fails to fulfill the seemingly reasonable and attainable brand promise you worked so diligently to construct, then it is all for naught.  On the other hand, if you can deliver on what you have promised you can create a competitive brand or even dominate your category.

The list of companies that I simply will not use anymore because they have promised so much and delivered so little grows a bit longer with each passing year.  Let me give you an example.   Several years ago I was moving across town, and rented a moving truck from a certain drive-it-yourself national truck rental company because they promised the newest, best maintained fleet of trucks in the business.  Great, sign me up.  To list all the problems I had with the truck would take too long, but the highlights should suffice to make my point.  The first phone call back to the local office happened while standing outside the truck, which was still running despite the fact that the key was in my pocket, a good 15 feet from the ignition.   The second call was when the back door of the truck essentially disintegrated, with each slat falling loose from the others, causing me to have to create a spider web-like rope structure to keep all my stuff in the truck.  The third (or fifth, maybe sixth) call was when the truck rolled backwards down a hill into a busy intersection despite being turned off (a miracle in and of itself), in park, with the parking brake firmly set and me and all my stuff still in it (the manager’s reaction that his head mechanic swore to him he had fixed that parking brake did little, at least in my mind, to rectify the situation).  The list goes on.  Needless to say, the failure of that one truck at that one location to meet the promise the entire brand ostensibly represented ensured that I will never ever use the company again.  If your brand promise is to have the newest and best maintained trucks on the road period, then you had best deliver the newest or, at the very least, the best maintained trucks at every location for every transaction.  It was a great brand promise, and it certainly resonated with me, but I must say I found the execution a bit lacking.  As I said before, you may not actually succeed in fulfilling the brand promise every time, but the possibility of achieving it must always be there, and, in this case, it most definitely was not.  Over the years since this happened, I have heard a variety of very similar stories about this particular brand, and the company in question no longer advertises having the newest and best maintained fleet.  Their biggest direct competitor now makes that claim, and so far in my experience they have lived up to it quite nicely. 

The flip side of this is, of course, if your product lives up to the promise you have created, and that promise resonates with your target consumers, you can build a highly competitive brand, or even revolutionize your category all on your own terms.  Let me give you another example – I rarely give the actual name of the product I am talking about, but in this case I am going to.  I love root beer.  I have always loved root beer, and when I come across a new brand, I buy it just to see how it stacks up against my favorites.  Or, at least, that is what I used to do.  Recently, I was in a market and came across Virgil’s Root Beer.  I picked it up to take a look and right there on the box was their brand promise: “Using Natural ingredients, We Brew a Root Beer So Pure, So Rich and Creamy, You’ll Swear It’s Made in Heaven.”  Now, that’s a pretty high bar to set, so as a marketer and a connoisseur of root beer, I was intrigued and grabbed a 4 pack.  When I got home, I tossed a couple in the freezer to get cold and started preparing dinner.  Once dinner was ready, I pulled them out, popped one open and gave it the old sniff test.  It certainly smelled good, so I tipped it back and took a small sip.

I no longer like root beer.  I just don’t care about it anymore.  I probably will never bother to buy a new root beer brand should I even happen to notice one in a store.  But I absolutely, positively love Virgil’s.  As those first drops slid across my taste buds and down my throat, I was too stunned to do anything more than stand there and stare into space.  I am pretty sure there were Angels singing.  When my wife asked if I was ok, I wordlessly handed her the other bottle.  For the next 15 minutes we just stood there together in the kitchen while our dinner got cold, sipping our Virgil’s and staring into space.  Now that’s how you deliver on a brand promise.  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Strategic Playbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.