Brand Promise: A Seven-Word Management Dashboard
MBA programs explore and promote a host of systems to analyze, monitor, and quantify business functions with the goal of being able to routinely and automatically generate meaningful measures to inform the decisions managers face every day.
I propose one overarching measure that every manager should keep on his or her desk and refer to every day, not to the exclusion of others, but to guide one’s view of all of the other measures.
What I’m referring to is Brand Promise. The concept is foolishly simple, yet it has been my experience that many businesses lose sight of brand promise (at their peril) while focusing on operational issues or product features and costs and so forth.
Brand promise is marketing-speak for the promise, pledge or assurance your company makes, either spoken or implied, of the benefits that a product or service will provide a customer. What is it that you do better than anyone else that makes the world a little bit better? The brand is a shorthand promise that your customer will understand and remember when he or she needs what you’re selling. It should be true and convey the essence of what you are doing or selling.
Please understand, a brand promise is not a catchy slogan, although it can be made into one. It should be an elemental expression of what you really do for people. And the brand promise should be summarized in seven words or less.
If you are thinking, ‘Well, what we do is fairly complicated…” Stop! That is not your promise. You eliminate steps and save researchers time (seven words), or create trouble-free family beach vacations, or fix cars right without hassles, or make stylish, tough, pocket-size digital cameras.
Why am I reviewing such a simple concept when we could be talking about melding balanced scorecard with TQM or something? Brand promise is a concept that can serve as an overall compass while traversing the confusing terrain of business. Efforts to cut costs, for example, can be measured against it:
Well, we need to cut costs to get around this rough patch in the economy, but will we still be heading north? What does our compass say? We create complete trouble-free family vacations. If we cut this department, it could create a couple of extra steps for our customers. Is that enhancing what we do best, which is creating trouble-free fun?
Not really? Well then, no cuts in that department. What about the next department? Could the company make cuts and still keep its promise? Everything a customer experiences should be aligned to the promise they were given. The greater this consistency and the more genuine the promise – all other things being equal – the better your business will perform.
Each step in customer interaction should form a cohesive fulfillment of the promise associated with the brand. Whether calling the company, shopping online, buying in the company’s store, unwrapping the product, looking at a proposal, or using your product, the customer should see your promise fulfilled and reinforced in every detail. One customer contact inconsistent with your promise is an invitation to doubt or discard your brand.
With this in mind, by all means, let us continue to monitor and measure. But let us measure our decisions by the promises we have made – in seven words or less.