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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 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:

1

Overpromising and under-delivering.

A

brand doesn’t do what it promises, either

willingly or because it is unable to.

2

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.’

3

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.

4

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.

5

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.

6

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.

7

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.

70

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JANUARY 2017

|

THINK