BRANDABLE
Brand And Deliver
Your brand makes a promise—don’t break it.
As a B2B company, your brand does more than serve as an identity; it also serves as a reminder of the promises you make to your customers. A study conducted by McKinsey & Company showed that business buyers rely heavily on vendor reputation to help them make purchasing decisions—sometimes more so than by asking questions about service, pricing, product availability and quality.
It’s not that these aspects of a business aren’t important; rather, the reputation conveyed by a brand serves as a shortcut to the answers. Rather than existing as a marginal element of a company’s value proposition, brand plays a central role.
So what does it look like when a company breaks a brand promise? Brand strategy expert Mark DiSomma shares these seven examples:
- – Overpromising and under-delivering. A brand doesn’t do what it promises, either willingly or because it is unable to.
- – Delivering on your expectations rather than the consumer’s. Does your customer know what you’re promising? If not, chances are high that you’ll give them ‘X’ when they were expecting ‘Y.’
- – Attaching conditions to your promise. Will you deliver on your promise only if consumers can meet stringent requirements or unrealistic qualifications? If so, you aren’t truly prepared to give your customer what you’ve promised.
- – Delaying fulfillment. Whether you miss delivering on a promise by the expected deadline, or you take too long to resolve a customer issue with the promise itself, trust in a brand can erode quickly.
- – Failing to launch the promise. Even worse than under-delivering is not delivering on a promise at all. If your product or service isn’t ready to share, don’t promote it in the hopes that it will be by the time consumers are ready to ask for it.
- – Promising the obvious. If you’re trying to sell a service that customers already expect, you’re merely committing to the minimum, which your customers can get somewhere else for less—if not for free.
- – Promising what everyone else already has delivered. Promises that appear to be unique at first can quickly become the norm when other companies deliver on them before you do. Stay in tune with the marketplace to ensure your brand is promising something unique and hard to replicate.
Brand promises, simply stated, tell customers what a company can and will do for them, and how it will be done. Of course, promises can have both explicit and implicit intentions, and the challenge for the company is to learn what its promises mean to the customer first.
