Delivering on the brand promise

A company’s brand promise can influence customer loyalty, employee engagement, and financial performance. How can marketers help their organisations deliver on it?

In a fiercely competitive business environment, companies rely on the strength of their brands and the promises they present. A brand promise encompasses what customers can expect from all interactions with a company, including their emotional experiences. It is embodied by an organisation’s people and translated through its products, services, and actions.

In every industry today, businesses and consumers are bombarded with an overwhelming choice of products and services. A distinctive and well-executed brand promise can cut through the clutter and drive intense customer loyalty and increased revenue. In short, a brand promise has the potential to make or break a company.

Why is brand promise so important?

A brand promise can directly affect an organisation’s bottom line positively or negatively. It can translate into lower cost of sales, because selling more products and services to loyal, emotionally connected customers is less expensive than acquiring new ones. Furthermore, when a company consistently realises its brand promise, it reinforces its reputation and builds brand equity—a store of goodwill that can help it weather events such as a cyberattack or unplanned service outage that compromise the customer experience.

Delivering on brand promise is directly tied to overall brand strength and can increase a company’s value. According to Millward Brown,¹ share prices of the top 100 global brands outperformed the S&P 500 and the MSCI World Index, a weighted index of global stocks maintained by MSCI Inc. (formerly Morgan Stanley Capital International) between April 2007 and April 2016.

However, when a company fails to stand behind its brand promise—by manufacturing a poorquality product, for instance—it can face unfavourable social media attention and other negative consequences. With such a hefty premium on brand and reputation, it’s more important than ever for companies to be aware of situations that can cause harm.

Getting behind the brand promise

Leaders who truly understand, embrace, and are committed to executing their organisation’s brand promise are often better able to anticipate and respond to brand risks. They know that reacting swiftly and thoroughly to problems as they arise can help mitigate any damage to their brand. They also understand the value of putting processes in place to ensure their brand promise is upheld and any budding problems are identified and handled promptly.

Marketers can benefit from considering three areas when delivering their brand promise:

• Seek feedback. Companies can conduct surveys to determine how well the brand resonates with customers and employees. Do customers con- sider it appealing, unique, and believable? Based on their recent experiences, do customers think the organisation is doing a good job following through on its promise? Do employees understand it? How engaged are they? Answers to these questions can help companies make adjustments to fulfil their brand promises more effectively. • Monitor performance. It’s important for companies to measure how well they deliver what they promise and create standards for monitoring performance through regularly scheduled evaluations. Consider a company that includes customer responsiveness as part of its brand promise. To support this value, it creates a policy stipulating that every written customer inquiry must be answered within 48 hours and every phone call within five minutes. To make sure these standards are met, it can insist on careful record keeping and logging of inquiries and complaints. Monitoring, establishing early threat detection, and effective risk management can help organisations turn potential threats into opportunities to further strengthen their brands. • Train and engage. It is essential that employees embody an organisation’s brand promise and understand how to effectively execute on it. Inconsistencies between internal and external branding messages can weaken organisational culture, confuse employees, and negatively affect customer experience. Ongoing training is important, especially for employees who have direct contact with customers. Including employees in decisions and asking for their ideas on how to improve initiatives are critical to enlisting their support. Customer-facing employees can also serve as a company’s eyes and ears in evaluating the customer experience and front-line processes. Companies may benefit from creating mechanisms for employees to provide feedback on how customers are responding to the brand. Companies with a consistently strong and differentiated brand promise work hard to sustain it. They don’t simply stay abreast of customer sentiment. They monitor and gather real-time feedback from the marketplace, and they use these insights to create action plans that consistently improve the execution of their brand promise and protect it from harm. For more information, please visit http://www.deloittedigital.com.mt