A lot of effort goes into making a consumer brand work. Done right—your strong customer facing brand tells your business niche or market segment what you do and what you stand for. It draws customers in and keeps them coming back.
We all have experienced what happens when a customer loves a particular brand. Customers will go out of their way to purchase products and as passionate brand ambassador—they nurture along other potential customers. Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles tackled the subject in their breakthrough 1993 book—Raving Fans.
Designing a brand that delivers is the easy part—consistently delivering on the promises that your brand makes to consumers is the challenge. As a business owner—having a brand promise and not-delivering the goods is like a college football team having twenty-two 5-Star recruits and not winning any games. Even worse is an empty promise—full of flowery words and phrases—with no intention of ever living up to the promise.
For example—lets use Apple. If you think back to IBM’s campaign for the ThinkPad—“Think IBM,” —Apple’s brand promise was meant to be a bit of a nudge at IBM with “Think Different”. Apple has had incredible success delivering on its brand promise — and has created products based on seeing the world a little differently—and to inspire their customers to do the same. I don’t think anyone would argue the point that Apple delivers!
So you may be thinking—what does a Brand Promise have to do with marketing? We believe that the brand promise drives everything from marketing communications to customer expectations and experience. Though the brand promise is not a legal contract between the customer and the company—it does define the experience that a customer should have with the brand and that message should be delivered through all marketing communications.
It is the role of marketing department or marketing team is to build the brand promise into the companies DNA and communicate and coordinate the delivery though all channels of advertising and marketing.
Does your small business have a brand promise? Is it communicated and coordinated in all of your branding and marketing efforts? If not—Pure Silver Creative can assist you in designing your Brand Promise and help incorporate it into everything you do. Learn more now by visiting our Contact Us page