Your brand promise plays a key role in your business’s reputation. It sets you apart from competitors, helps you retain loyal customers, and keeps you afloat through economic volatility.
Laetro has the tools to help you showcase your brand promise and illustrate precisely what sets you apart. Let’s get into it—exploring what exactly your brand promise entails, why it matters, the ingredients you’ll need to maintain one, and how to measure the impact your promise has.
Brand Promise: What It Is and Why It Matters
Your brand promise is related to, but stands distinct from, your brand. Your brand is how you help to define yourself to your customers. It’s who you are. On the other hand, your brand promise is what you’re there to help your audience with.
To put it another way, your brand helps build a relationship between your business and your customers; the strength of that relationship depends entirely on how well you deliver on your brand promise.
A brand promise is not a mission statement (an internal set of values or objectives that helps your employees orient their work around shared goals). Rather, your brand promise is outward-facing, defined by what you offer your customers if they work with or buy from you.
What You Need to Build Your Brand Promise
Creating and maintaining a strong brand promise rests on five key ingredients:
- Transparency
- Accountability
- Reliability
- Consistency
- Indispensability
Let’s dive deeper into each: why they’re important and how they help you achieve better relationships with your customers.
Transparency
We tend to buy from sources we trust, and transparency plays a big part in assessing the strength of that trust. Customers today expect companies to be forthright about how they work, what they provide, and who they partner with.
Sharing information about how you generate your revenue, what you use it for, how you set your prices, and what you believe in goes a long way in establishing credibility with customers. On the other hand, being disingenuous and secretive can negatively impact how customers perceive the fulfillment of your brand promise.
A great way to increase transparency is to live out your core values internally. How do you support your employees’ health if you're a health services company? What do you use to cater your business meetings if you sell organic foods? Actions always come off as more transparent than prepared statements.
It’s also a good idea to share bad news with your customers before they hear about it elsewhere. If you run into supply chain issues and must change a delivery date, customers would prefer an advance notice from you instead of an unexpected UPS notification. If a product line must be discontinued, let your customers know before they go hunting for it.
Accountability
Accountability is increasingly important in today’s economy. Rather than a marker that helps you stand out, it’s now a baseline requirement.
This comes down to how forthcoming you are about how your company measures up to your brand promise. If there are shortcomings, do you take ownership? And are you taking genuine steps to improve?
To make accountability easier, be specific in defining your brand promise. “We have the best burgers in America” is hardly quantifiable; it’s difficult for customers to know exactly what you promise.
On the other hand, “We prepare the high-quality, ethically-sourced ingredients to deliver exceptional meals” makes it easier for customers to understand exactly what standards to hold you to.
Reliability & Consistency
Like accountability, reliability is now a baseline expectation most customers have for the companies they work with or buy from. As such, your brand promise creates expectations about what it’s like to work with you.
At every stage of the process, it’s important to present your company as able to deliver on expectations reliably. How easily can you accommodate customer requests? How flexible are you when it comes to changes?
Adapting to the needs of each specific customer will define in their mind how reliable you are at delivering on your brand promise. Consistency—hand-in-hand with reliability—is about maintaining your brand promise over time. Your promises are only as good as your ability to consistently deliver on them, after all.
In today’s glutted market, customers are spoiled for choice. One bad experience can be enough to turn a long-term customer away; consistent service keeps them locked in.
In addition to providing consistency with customer experiences, brand consistency is also integral. A company’s brand helps it develop relationships with its customers; if a company’s branding doesn’t stay consistent, it’s hard for customers to understand who is making promises. Consistent branding helps customers trust in your company through learning what to expect from you.
Indispensability
In this context, indispensability means there is something in your brand promise that customers can’t get anywhere else. But remember: to truly be indispensable, your promise must actually match the needs of your audience.
Delivering on promises transparently, accountably, reliably, and consistently doesn’t matter if your service isn’t valuable. On the other hand, if your customers can’t imagine going elsewhere because of your unique value, you’ll have them converted into devoted fans.
The Importance of Your Customer Happiness Score
Your customer happiness score tracks how well your products or services measure up to what your customers count on. It’s all about expectations: what expectations you’ve set for your customers through your brand promise and how those customers perceive your delivery of those promises. It’s the best metric to determine the value of your brand promise.
Customers are more likely to return when they’re happy with what you provide. But even more importantly, happy customers also advocate on your behalf with friends, family, and colleagues—free social proof for your brand! On the other hand, once you’ve lost a customer, it’s now harder than ever to win them back.
But not just your products or services that define a customer happiness score. How well do you deliver what you provide? Is your customer service team helpful and easily accessible? How easily do you handle mistakes or unexpected changes? All of these factors can have a major impact on your customer experience.
Make Good On Your Brand Promise With Laetro
Your brand promise is an integral part of your business. It defines the strength of your customer relationships, how you’re spoken about in the marketplace, and how likely your audience will become your next loyal customer.
When building a brand promise that you can follow through on—and that keeps customers coming back for your unique services—it helps to have branding experts at your side. That’s where Laetro comes in.
The creative team at Laetro lives and breathes branding. We’ve worked on countless projects for household names worldwide and are ready to help you boost your branding too. Is it time for a branding refresh? Reach out, and let’s get started.
