Do you remember the first time someone broke a promise to you? It hurt, didn’t it? And more than that, it damaged your trust with the person who broke the promise.
Just like personal relationships, business relationships are built on trust. In business, your brand is your trust mark. It’s the promise you make to your customers and clients.
If you break that trust, restoring it can be a difficult, if not impossible task. Once disappointed, a customer may choose to try a competitor, rather than give you a second chance to fail them.
As a business owner or manager, you are the guardian of the brand promise. It’s your responsibility to keep an eye on whether the promise is being kept and to identify threats to the brand promise so that they can be remedied before they affect the customer’s experience.
How and why do brand promises fail? Watch out to make sure that your promise is not:
- Too vague – Customers want to buy when they know what to expect. If your promise is too subtle or the benefit you are promising is not specific enough, your customer will find the next “sure thing” from someone else.
- Too complicated – If your brand promise has too many moving parts or is framed in a way that is too difficult to understand, you are making the customer work too hard. Your job is to make it easy and simple for the customer to get what they need from you.
- Inconsistent with the customer’s needs – Remember, your job is to give the customer what they want or need. What you want to create or deliver is a secondary consideration. If your customer wants a car that runs fast, but you offer a car that goes farther because it doesn’t accelerate beyond a certain speed, you’re missing the mark –and the sale.
- The same as everyone else’s – It’s important to stand out from the crowd if you want to attract and retain customers. If a customer can get what you are offering from just anyone, they are as likely to buy from someone else as to buy from you. Figure out what sets you apart and emphasize that difference in your brand promise.
- Contains too many conditions – When a customer has to read through the fine print to make sure that your brand promise applies to them, you’ve set up too many hoops for them to jump through and they’ll think you’ve created too many loopholes to get yourself off the hook for delivering.
The best brand promises are specific, simple, aligned with your customer, unique to your business and (mostly) unconditional. Think about the brands you are loyal to. What keeps you coming back to them? Model your own brand promise from their success.
Don’t just make a brand promise, keep it. That’s the key to making your business successful.
Blessings,
