What Is A Brand Promise?

If you’ve been following me for awhile, you know that I’m a huge fan of content marketing. One of the main reasons I love content marketing is because it helps people find answers to their questions. But taking a few steps back to before creating content, a brand must be clear on its intentions to the consumer, the community, and be clear on its values. The declaration of this intention, is a brand promise.

A brand promise is a promise that you make to your audience when they encounter your content. For example, let’s say you have a brand that sells fitness apparel. Your brand promise is to help people improve their health, using excellent quality material, not harmful to nature. When a customer reads a blog post about how to get healthier, he or she understands that your brand is promising to help them achieve that goal without having other direct or indirect implications.

A brand promise is different than a slogan. A brand promise makes a promise about the benefits that your audience will get when they read your content. A slogan is usually just a catch phrase. It doesn’t have the same weight as a brand promise. For example, Nike's popular slogan is "Just Do It", while their brand promise is "To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world".

The Benefits of Writing A Brand Promise

A brand promise is a clear statement of what a company does or what it stands for. It’s a promise to a customer that the company will do what it says it will do. It should be simple, direct, and compelling. In fact, it should be so compelling that people don’t even realize they are reading a brand promise. In this post, we’re going to walk through how to write a brand promise that will help your business grow and increase traffic to your website.

A good brand promise will:

• Tell people exactly what you do
• Tell them why they should do business with you
• Make them feel like you care about them and their community

Examples of Good Brand Promises

• Geico: “15 minutes or less can save you 15% or more on car insurance.” This brand promise has become the cornerstone of Geico's marketing strategy, propelling them to the top of the auto insurance industry. A time-based promise can be difficult to keep, but it is simple to measure. Geico has done a fantastic job maintaining their reputation and keeping their word.
• Coca-Cola: “To inspire moments of optimism and uplift.” The brand promise for Coca-Cola is quite unconventional. The mission statement does not reference the company's products or services; rather, it tries to reflect the company's employees' shared philosophy. Coca-Cola portrays itself as a lifestyle brand that is about much more than just producing successful beverages with this brand promise.
• Starbucks: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” It comes as no surprise that Starbucks is a superb example of a brand that consistently delivers on its promise. Starbucks, like many other companies, has defined itself as a lifestyle brand seeking to deliver the world much more than a fantastic cup of coffee.

How To Write A Brand Promise

Without selling out- it's clear that a brand's promise plays a significant role in the brand's success and ultimately the success of its customers. While the brand promise might not define a brand, it does set the stage for a brand to succeed. Brands that have strong brand promises do a few things really well: they build credibility, they differentiate themselves from competitors, and they offer an opportunity to sell more of their product or service. The first step in creating a compelling brand promise is to ask yourself these questions:

What is my brand?

What do I stand for?

How do I want to be perceived by customers and the world at large?

What are my core values?

What am I trying to achieve with my marketing?

Do you know what your brand promise is? Take a moment to reflect on the answers to these questions and see if you can come up with an answer.

Why Your Brand Promise Needs To Be Written Down

The benefits of writing a brand promise are huge. By telling people exactly what your company does, you open the door to more conversions. When someone is interested in a product, but they don’t know exactly what it does, they tend to do two things. They Google it and they talk to friends and family. These are both very time consuming ways of finding out what a product does and if the product is right for them. By telling your customers exactly what you do, you remove this friction.

The 5-Step Brand Promise Formula

Brand Promise is a simple, credible, different, memorable, and inspiring statement. It describes how a brand should be. When you're selling a product or service, you need a promise that clearly articulates your customers' needs. Without a clear promise, you risk losing potential customers. A simple promise is easier to communicate, and it lets you focus on the most important part of your message, which is the reason you're offering something. A credible promise means that your products and services meet a certain standard of quality, and you back it up with your promise. A different promise gives you an advantage over the competition. And a memorable promise will draw customers into buying from you. An inspiring promise is what makes people fall in love with your brand.

The five steps being: Simple, Credible, Different, Memorable, Inspiring.

In conclusion, a brand promise is a statement of fact about your product or service. It's a promise of what you'll deliver. When you promise something, you're giving your customer a reason to believe that you can deliver what you say. The promise has to be believable, and it should inspire confidence in your customers. That means that the promise should be backed up by real facts.

Though not always rule of thumb, a good promise has three parts. It starts with a strong statement of fact. The second part is a promise for value. And the third part is an assurance of quality.