Your Brand is Your Promise

Did your mom or dad (or maybe it was a grandparent) ever tell you, “Don’t make a promise you can’t keep”? If they didn’t, they should have, because it’s good advice both personally and professionally.

In business and in life, once you break someone’s trust, it’s hard — if not impossible — to earn it back again. So what can you promise your customers — knowing that you have to, under all circumstances, keep that promise? And what can you promise that is different than your competition? Your answers to these questions should be the core of your brand.

Now some of you may be confused. Some people think that their brand is their logo, but that’s a pretty narrow view. Yes, your logo does need to represent your brand, but your brand is really an experience. The behaviors behind your brand will create each customer’s experience, and what they experience will determine the success or failure of your brand.

Let’s think about this a minute. Take Disney. What is Disney’s brand promise? Magical family fun? Yes. But it goes much deeper than that. What Disney is really promising, something that other fun brands don’t promise is trustworthiness. They want parents to feel safe letting their children experience the Disney brand. Security at the parks is unbelievable. Language and on-screen action is regulated by the brand. If your kid (or your nephew or the kid down the block if you don’t have kids of your own) says they want to go see a Disney movie, do you think twice about letting them go? No. Why? Because you trust the brand. You can rely on Disney to provide a quality, wholesome experience. You know the kids will have fun, but you also know that Disney is a safe bet. Because kids could have fun a lot of places that you don’t trust and where you wouldn’t feel safe about letting them go.

Make sense?

So what does your brand promise? Think hard. What does it really promise? Maybe on the surface you promise the same thing a lot of your competitors promise, and that might be OK. But deep down, what can you promise — and deliver on — that your competitor doesn’t promise or can’t deliver better than you? Figure that out, and you’re on your way to success. Developing your logo and all the other parts and pieces that make up what your brand looks like is a lot easier once you know what it is that you’re promising.

Brand promises kept create happy customers who not only stay with you as long as you keep your promise, but they also tell other potential customers about you. And with social media, that has never been truer than it is today. Happy, loyal, retained customers continue to add to the bottom line. And, they help you acquire new customers at a much lower cost. So there’s value in defining your brand promise.

What do you think about your brand being your promise? We’d love to hear from you. Feel free to share your ideas on our 123Print Facebook page, tweet us @123Print or leave us a comment below.