The Most Powerful Brand Promise Your Company Isn’t Making
Stunning research uncovers the key to promises that build loyalty while powerfully aligning companies around a true North Star
Think of some of the most instantly recognizable brand promises in history:
IBM: "Building a smarter planet."
Avis: "We try harder."
Adidas: "Original is never finished."
Believe it or not, all three share one fatal flaw:
They're focused on the wrong thing.
The most comprehensive brand messaging analysis of over 2,000 campaigns has revealed that self-focused statements like these are costing companies billions—and what to do instead.
Breakthrough insight
Roger L. Martin, one of the world’s top management thinkers, considers this a quantum leap in understanding:
“It is no exaggeration to say that in the four decades I have been working on strategy and branding, this Promise to the Customer finding is the single most exciting discovery with which I have been involved.”
Roger L. Martin, Making a Promise to the Customer
As we’ll see, the most effective companies make a very special kind of promise.
Broad applications
If you’re wondering whether you’re wasting effort in building things your customers don’t care about, or you’re having a hard time telling the story of your product in a way that users care about, the “Promise to the Customer” may be the lens you need.
And it can apply whether you’re working in a zero to one startup, or in an established legacy Enterprise.
Simplifying framework
A ”Promise to the Customer” represents an intent that cuts across every part of your business, solving the problem with strategy being complex to understand and hard to execute against.
And rallying everyone around a single, clear focus.
Corporate “narcissism”
But too many brands become so invested in telling their own “story” that they ignore their users and their needs, leading to wasted product development and brand efforts.
One recent misguided attempt was Tropicana’s spending $35 million dollars on a disastrous rebrand that directly led to a 20% drop in sales. They quickly scrapped the new branding, returning to the old packaging for a loss of over $50 million.
The CEO and the branding agency were convinced they were “modernizing” the brand. Customers instead thought they had cheapened it.
I would argue Tropicana made the most basic mistake of taking away the things their most loyal customers’ had gotten used to over time.
Loyalty is a losing game
Because brand “loyalty” doesn’t exist. Except perhaps in the minds of the executive suite.
The only thing customers care about is what you can do for them.
And consistently and reliably doing it.
Over time, this leads to building habits.
Because at its core, that’s the essence of what building a brand is all about.
And this gets at the heart of the connection between two disciplines.
Strategy = Marketing
Roger Martin is the originator of integrative and design thinking applied to business and architect of the concept of marketing and strategy as the same discipline.
Martin sees the “Promise to the Customer” as a theory that brings together the ideas of demand creation and demand capture, marketing, and strategy.
“Understanding the right promise to make to the right customer is the essence of playing to win.”
Roger L. Martin
In a recent example that ties to the area of modern product management, AirBnB’s Brian Chesky took a page from Apple’s product playbook and merged the “inbound” aspects of the Product Manager role with the “outbound” aspects of the Product Marketing Manager role.
In an interesting parallel to Roger Martin’s insight, Chesky argues that developing a product and delivering it effectively are part of the same discipline.
What is a “Promise to the Customer”?
Brands make promises all the time.
But those promises are only rarely focused on something their customers find valuable.
Once you’re aware of the mindset that branding and strategy represent the same discipline, it logically follows how central making a promise is to your strategy.
It’s telling them what they can expect from you.
Deconstructing Your Customer Promise
Great customer promises lie in understanding your customers and designing, delivering, and talking about something they uniquely care about.
The WARC study further lays out three key elements of a strong “Promise to the Customer”:
Memorable
Good “Promises to the Customer” require deep expertise across creativity and novelty to capture mindshare.
Valuable
“Value” doesn’t mean low-cost, but the design of the appropriate pricing strategy. Picking the right distribution channels further enhances building and sustaining the brand.
Deliverable
Consistently delivering against the promise differentiates marketing that acts as a mere promotion, versus creating crucial link throughouty the product strategy, design, iteration, and delivery process.
The main takeaway?
Never make a promise you can’t deliver on.
What can the right “Promise to the Customer” do for your company?
Do campaigns that make a Promise to the Customer actually deliver a competitive advantage?
The “promise” mindset is a compelling upstream strategic idea that is capable of delivering clear upstream (employee clarity and focus) and downstream benefits (% of increased market share and revenue) to businesses.
WARC, Making a Promise to the Customer
Making winning a team sport
“The best thing about a “Promise to the Customer” – You have a shared source of truth for the whole business that busts through all the silos.”
Jann Schwarz, Founder and Head, The B2B Institute at LinkedIn
Effective promises align everyone across multiple different, usually siloed functions like Product Marketing, Sales, Engineering, Product Management, Design together with a simple, clear, shared mission and purpose.
A great example of this was John F. Kennedy, Jr. who so inspired with his aspirational vision that even the janitor sweeping the floor at NASA could proudly say they were part of the grander mission of putting a man on the moon.
Aligning across the company to deliver a unique car rental experience
Rental car company SIXT makes one clear customer promise:
“Not A car; THE car”
In other words, when you choose your car and make a reservation, you don’t choose from a “class” of cars. SIXT promises you you’ll get exactly the car you reserved, exactly when you reserved it.
This customer promise focuses the entire SIXT organization. Everyone knows what the goal is, and everyone works towards that singular goal.
All of SIXT’s systems are then optimized around this promise:
Logistics, management, marketing, sales, etc., all align to deliver the unique SIXT experience.
Making a “Promise to the Customer” simplifies your business
One unique benefit of making a strong “Promise to the Customer” is marketing becomes a value generator instead of just a sales support function.
Instead of telling people how great you are…
Telling customers how you’re going to solve a specific problem for them is the most powerful and overlooked thing you can do.
It also has the dual benefits of:
Simplifying what a brand is – A brand is, at its core, a promise
Simplifying how to build a brand – Once you’ve made that promise and consistently delivered against it, you build a customer habit, which is the foundation of brand building.
A “Promise to the Customer” also moves ownership of the delivery of the brand experience from the marketing team to everyone across the organization to rally around, and represents the single most powerful unifying force to convince your customer and simplify your strategy.
15 Minutes to Savings
When you make a promise to thae customer, you open the door to tying together your business in unprecedented ways.
Think of GEICO’s “Promise to the Customer”:
15 minutes could save you 15% or more
Do you think GEICO has to go through lengthy, complex deep dives to figure out what optimizations it needs to make across its entire business in order to deliver against that promise?
Sustainable, viable speed and savings form the foundation of their promise.
Anything and everything that contributes to delivering against that promise to the customer unifies and focuses everyone across the company.
What Customer Promises Can Do for Your Brand
The WARC study revealed that a clear and effectively-stated “Promise to the Customer” led to an almost 50% greater increase in brand health measures than non-”Promise to the Customer” campaigns.
PTTC campaigns are 48% more likely to drive brand health improvements than non-PTTC campaigns.
These brand health measures span across crucial elements, answering basic customer needs like:
Brand consideration
How does this brand make you feel?
Purchase intent
How likely are you to buy this brand/product?
Brand perception
This brand cares about people.
Is a brand that I trust.
Brand preference
How likely would you be to recommend this brand to a friend, family member, or colleague?
This brand lasts longer or is better quality/taste/experience.
Quality perception
This brand is different from other brands.
This brand lasts longer or is better quality/taste/experience.
Value perception
This brand is good value for money.
This brand is worth paying more for.
“Promise to the Customer” campaigns also provide over 2 ½ times more effectiveness (38% to 15%) at increasing brand health measures at lower cost investments than other campaigns.
This means promoting a “Promise to the Customer” delivers far more “bang for your buck,” regardless of your marketing investment.
The powerful lens
As Martin notes, the “Promise to the Customer” represents one of the most powerful lenses ever through which to view everything a company does.
Strategy, Marketing, Branding, and how you organize and operate your organization, rallying around your promise to the customer to consistently deliver against it and make it a reality for your customers.
What is the credible value we promise to customers and how do we deliver it?
To quote David Tiltman, SVP Content WARC:
1. As a model to be applied upstream in a business, it can help interpret what the marketing department is trying to achieve in words the rest of the business can understand. That has the potential to solve the “brand” problem.
2. As a downstream impetus to communication, a “Promise to the Customer” appears to have an edge when it comes to delivering positive impact on brand metrics and sustained commercial impact.
Where “Promise to the Customer doesn’t deliver
Interestingly, where a “Promise to the Customer” performed poorly was in generating social media buzz and virality (55% for non-promise campaigns vs. only 43% for promise-based campaigns) and PR value (37% for non-promise campaigns vs. only 26% for promise-based campaigns)
Why? Customer promises aren’t “newsworthy” – they don’t easily attach themselves to the latest fad.
But while you may generate short-lived attention with virality, you’ll unlikely get the right customers to click through, develop relationships with them, and build the trust necessary to generate sales.
You might also see this play out with social media influencers who may have tens of thousands of followers, but themselves be unable to sell, promote, or even hold down a job.
So it may not always be the worst thing if your social campaigns aren’t delivering the sheer feeding frenzy you hoped for.
Customer promises are an effective way to drive core brand health measures and introduce people in the right way to your brand, delivering much better bottom-line results than social media buzz or PR value.
My Promise to You
Once you understand the power of making a “Promise to the Customer,” you won’t look at the way you talk about your products and services in the same way ever again.
Building a brand doesn’t mean telling people how unique and special you are – it lies in telling them what you can do for them.
And you’ll think differently about the value of social media “buzz” or virality.
Compared to the far less glamorous but far more powerful work of designing the right promise for the right people and consistently and reliably delivering against it.
Wow, I just looked at that Tropicana rebrand. Who in the world thought that was a good idea!?!