For small and mid-sized businesses your competition, footprint, or location might be hindering your ability to scale and reach the same market as your industry’s giants. That’s okay, because everyone starts small. The next tool in your marketing strategy should be focused on setting your business apart from your competition… so your brand stays on top of your peers in the minds of your customers.
What’s a Brand Promise, and how is that more than a Slogan or Logo?
Your company’s image should already effectively represent your brand, who you are, and offer some tonal guidance to viewers. A Brand Promise is more inclusive than just your slogan, value prop, or mission statement; in fact it doesn’t even have to be stated publicly. Your promise should encapsulate all of those things, and articulate the relationship your employees and your brand have with your customers.
You Talk the Talk, Now Walk the Walk.
It is now a justified “best practice” to present your brand as caring for what your customers care for. Brand loyalties are created when individuals can easily align themselves with that brand, or in certain cases include that brand and their products or services as a significant part of their public identity.
Even in dramatically competitive or saturated markts, there are always people who have such an emotional connection with a brand they become a spokesperson for it within their own circles. Successfully implementing a Brand Promise means forging those emotional connections.
What’s Required?
Whether you have a dedicated marketing department, customer service division, or simply a dedicated staff that wears multiple hats — make it understood that everyone should approach each interaction with a customer, lead, or the public with the right attitude. From an outside perspective, people should see your company taking purposeful action.
Promote positivity, be approachable and relatable to the public, and strive to create beneficial outcomes for your customers as they search for, purchase, use, and continue to value your product or service. These interactions should go beyond simple product/service related benefits, and can often be aligned with societal action like supporting a charity or non-profit organization.
Act With Purpose, Establish Goals, and Follow Through.
Once you have started to form your organization’s Brand Promise you should have an idea of what it means to your employees and your customers. Make your team proud to work for your company, and your customers excited to use your product or service. The desired result here is that every interaction both within your organization and to the public aligns with the image you wish to project.
Your goals should be to focus your company’s overall direction, to differentiate yourself among your competitors, or to attract new customers and talent for recruitment into your team. Essentially winning hearts and minds, following through on your Brand Promise means that both your employees and your customers can intertwine your brand with their own sense of fulfillment in their lives.
Fulfilling your Brand Promise Through Marketing.
Your marketing team has an important role in promoting your Brand Promise. While a top down change in energy starts with leadership and ends with every worker’s daily duty, it’s the job of your marketers to share that story with your customers and the public at large.
This should be accomplished both by pursuing your own initiatives within various mediums and channels, in addition to reaching out to brand ambassadors — individuals who can leverage their own expertise, notoriety, and engagement with their own audiences to introduce your brand and what you stand behind.
The purpose of a brand ambassador isn’t necessarily to promote or showcase your specific services or products so much as a being a vehicle to form new emotive responses; aligning your brand with positive sentiment a target audience favors. For this reason, choosing brand ambassadors is a delicate task… and you must research to ensure their audience is the correct demographic, their reach is worth their cost, and most importantly that they stand for the same ethical positions as your organization. Choose someone who can develop and maintain a positive brand image by naturally interacting with the people you want to reach.
Where do I start?
Most organizations in need of a strong Brand Promise already have the seeds that might grow into a forest of positivity. At Matcha Design when we work with brands and get to know the team behind the counter, in the cubicles, on the phones, in the shop, or working the floor we can see people eager to take pride in their roles.
Our advice is to look within, and build upon sentiment and empathy that’s already there. As a full service agency helping our clients discover and highlight what they do, is what we do best.
