By Clive M. Siachiyako
Corporate brands make promises. Making a promise is easy; but keeping it is the hard part. Promises made with words can only be kept through actions. How you live by your words matters most than how you say it. It is about walking the corporate brand talk. Your products/services should meet what you promise. When you say you offer “Qualify Training” you need to put in place requisites for you to keep that promise.
Defining Brand Promise
A brand promise is an expression of what your customers can expect from you. It describes the proposition and the value your service/product represent to the customer. It is the expectation you have given your customers…what you want to be remembered for. It is basically what gets the attention of buyers. It is what generates desire and invokes favourable emotions in customers.
The brand promise drives institutions’ actions and investment in people, processes, products, technology, and delivery channels. It creates a laser beam focus that provides clarity and cohesion to the institution’s many and disparate activities.
Your customer experiences can help you define a brand promise that best meets their expectations. It provides a firm foundation for designing ways of meeting your customer needs; because any time a customer buys a product/service, they have a mental picture of what their purchase will do and how it will improve their lives. Often, these expectations are based on presumptions, which can lead to real disappointment when you put a substandard product or service into action as a service provider/product manufacturer.
Sometimes these expectations are built on the recommendations of others; while sometimes, they are communicated by the brand itself. A customer’s bad experience thus adversely affects loyal customers’ effort they had put in to market your service/product. You have control over the buyer’s experience through brand promise and its fulfillment. A brand promise is one of the most powerful aspects of branding.
Defining Brand Promise
A brand promise is an expression of what your customers can expect from you. It describes the proposition and the value your service/product represent to the customer. It is the expectation you have given your customers…what you want to be remembered for. It is basically what gets the attention of buyers. It is what generates desire and invokes favourable emotions in customers.
The brand promise drives institutions’ actions and investment in people, processes, products, technology, and delivery channels. It creates a laser beam focus that provides clarity and cohesion to the institution’s many and disparate activities.
Your customer experiences can help you define a brand promise that best meets their expectations. It provides a firm foundation for designing ways of meeting your customer needs; because any time a customer buys a product/service, they have a mental picture of what their purchase will do and how it will improve their lives. Often, these expectations are based on presumptions, which can lead to real disappointment when you put a substandard product or service into action as a service provider/product manufacturer.
Sometimes these expectations are built on the recommendations of others; while sometimes, they are communicated by the brand itself. A customer’s bad experience thus adversely affects loyal customers’ effort they had put in to market your service/product. You have control over the buyer’s experience through brand promise and its fulfillment. A brand promise is one of the most powerful aspects of branding.
Brand promise components
1. Consistency experience
This is the absolute critical component in building a brand. Whether one uses your product/service in a rural town or abroad they expect your product to taste the same or your service quality to be the same. Customers want and need a sense of excellence each and every time they use your service. Consistency, reliability and predictability are the cornerstones of creating long term relationships with customers, and customer retention and loyalty.
2. Consistent look-and-feel
To build a brand, you must develop a strong brand image. Consistent look-and-feel extends to your logo, colours, typefaces, decoration, employee clothing, etc. You set your visibility tools and make them your identifiers from the clutter. Let them differentiate you from others. They should stand out and be ‘felt’ by customers. Your colours, logo, the typefaces, etc. should be used with a conscious of your corporate brand and your visibility among competitors.
Position your consistent look-and-feel in a specific place in your customer’s mind. Ask yourself i) what do I want to come to my customer’s minds when they hear my institution’s name? ii) does my institution comes to mind when people think about the product/service of my specialty?, iii) what comes to mind when customers think training?, etc.
3. Consistent quality
It is not enough to deliver a consistent experience to your customers. The experience must also be of a certain level of quality. Your quality of service/product should be consistent attributes which customers expect from it. Your consistency determines how often you show and offer the desirable service qualities to your customers. Service consistency is an expectation of all customers at all times; they want peace of mind and no unpleasant surprises.
Service consistency implies achieving sameness, uniformity and fairness in the delivery of all the service attributes, regardless of time, place, occasion, and service provider. Be all-weather consistent with your services/products, then your customers will say “this brand meets its promise.”
4. Repeated exposure
To remember your brand, customers must hear it or see it over and over. Of course, building brand awareness takes money, and that is a challenge if you are a small company. The key is to clearly and narrowly define your target market. Then, make sure those potential customers see you many times by repeatedly advertising in the same publications and attending the same networking events.
5. Managing your brand promise
Proving the brand promise every day demands your organisational skills and coordination between people doing the work and process and programmes you use meet your goals. Meeting your customers’ expectations is a continuous process in which the brand is carefully managed. This requires perfect connect of your processes with your brand promise.
Training new employees on your values and vision contribute to your brand performance. Emphasise the importance of living by your brand promise to new employees is from the start, they will be able to act accordingly. You can take this step further by only hiring new employees who are a good fit for the brand; those who can support your vision, mission and goals.
Delivering on your brand promise should ‘planted’ throughout your organisation. Your values should be visible every single day as the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) of the organisation. This was spelt out back in 1997 by Steve Jobs: “to me, marketing your corporate brand is about values. This is a very complicated world; it is a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”
1. Consistency experience
This is the absolute critical component in building a brand. Whether one uses your product/service in a rural town or abroad they expect your product to taste the same or your service quality to be the same. Customers want and need a sense of excellence each and every time they use your service. Consistency, reliability and predictability are the cornerstones of creating long term relationships with customers, and customer retention and loyalty.
2. Consistent look-and-feel
To build a brand, you must develop a strong brand image. Consistent look-and-feel extends to your logo, colours, typefaces, decoration, employee clothing, etc. You set your visibility tools and make them your identifiers from the clutter. Let them differentiate you from others. They should stand out and be ‘felt’ by customers. Your colours, logo, the typefaces, etc. should be used with a conscious of your corporate brand and your visibility among competitors.
Position your consistent look-and-feel in a specific place in your customer’s mind. Ask yourself i) what do I want to come to my customer’s minds when they hear my institution’s name? ii) does my institution comes to mind when people think about the product/service of my specialty?, iii) what comes to mind when customers think training?, etc.
3. Consistent quality
It is not enough to deliver a consistent experience to your customers. The experience must also be of a certain level of quality. Your quality of service/product should be consistent attributes which customers expect from it. Your consistency determines how often you show and offer the desirable service qualities to your customers. Service consistency is an expectation of all customers at all times; they want peace of mind and no unpleasant surprises.
Service consistency implies achieving sameness, uniformity and fairness in the delivery of all the service attributes, regardless of time, place, occasion, and service provider. Be all-weather consistent with your services/products, then your customers will say “this brand meets its promise.”
4. Repeated exposure
To remember your brand, customers must hear it or see it over and over. Of course, building brand awareness takes money, and that is a challenge if you are a small company. The key is to clearly and narrowly define your target market. Then, make sure those potential customers see you many times by repeatedly advertising in the same publications and attending the same networking events.
5. Managing your brand promise
Proving the brand promise every day demands your organisational skills and coordination between people doing the work and process and programmes you use meet your goals. Meeting your customers’ expectations is a continuous process in which the brand is carefully managed. This requires perfect connect of your processes with your brand promise.
Training new employees on your values and vision contribute to your brand performance. Emphasise the importance of living by your brand promise to new employees is from the start, they will be able to act accordingly. You can take this step further by only hiring new employees who are a good fit for the brand; those who can support your vision, mission and goals.
Delivering on your brand promise should ‘planted’ throughout your organisation. Your values should be visible every single day as the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) of the organisation. This was spelt out back in 1997 by Steve Jobs: “to me, marketing your corporate brand is about values. This is a very complicated world; it is a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”
It thus boils down that every moment your product/service is in contact with clients, you want to give them the correct LOOK and FEEL of your brand. Your actions, your messages, your product/service quality and packaging should be distinctively visible and stand out. Slackening wanes down on your customers’ trust and confidence in you and may result into lower usage of your services/products.
Customers have to experience the brand promise through all the different channels: via the telephone, in all the stores/locations, on the website and in face-to-face contact, etc. Social and technological developments make it necessary nowadays to prove what you promise in your (marketing) communication. Consumers are becoming more assertive and, with the launch of Twitter and Facebook, they are able to forward their opinions to many followers and friends. If a brand promise is not in harmony with reality, this can be communicated in an instant to large groups of people located all over the world, with the result that the credibility of your service/product is eroded.
These days, the brand promise is regarded as key to communication and behaviour as a whole. The external focus of the brand has given way to seeing the product/service as the ‘guiding principle’ for the entire organisation. A brand touch point is every moment a brand interacts with customers, employees, partners and other stakeholders is very important in placing your above board.
People need to be able to trust your service/product. You thus need to shift the way you present your products and services to the market. Quality and living up to your promise play a key part. We are living in the world of “promise and prove.” Trust is the lever here. Your market has to trust your product/service.
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