The Age of the Pure Marketing Slogan Is Over. Today, the brand promise functions as an absolute operational agreement (or contract) between the buyer and seller.
Buyers may validate the seller's brand promise at any point in time (e.g., during software set-up) and through many different methods (e.g., determining their billing and collections processes).
The True Meaning of a Brand Promise
In this guide, we will examine how the top business and consumer-facing companies create measurable service standards from their commitments. This provides modern operators with clear brand promise examples of how to execute these guarantees successfully.
Many leadership teams mistakenly view taglines as representative of their commitments. A tagline serves to entice a consumer (or audience) to consider purchasing a product (or service) and is often designed to create a positive association with the product.
A brand promise represents the exact value that consumers can expect to receive from a product (or service) every time they interact with a company. For example, if a company advertises its product as fast, then the checkout process must take less than two minutes.
If a company's sales team promises "security," then it cannot have any data breaches. Violating a brand promise erodes customer trust and increases customer attrition.
Beyond Taglines and Mission Statements
Your company's mission statement identifies its long-term strategic direction (i.e., where it plans to be in five years). A brand promise, on the other hand, identifies the "present-day" value of what a customer receives when they interact with your company.
When creating a brand promise, you do not have to use elaborate language to communicate your company's value. The most successful commitments to a market use simple language to clarify the customer's expectation of service.
The success of a brand promise is determined much more by how it is delivered than by the exact wording used. A "mediocre" sentence, if executed consistently well in day-to-day business, will always outperform a clever phrase that is associated with poor customer service.
Validating Your Promise
When operators create a new commitment to the market, they typically validate the strength of that commitment using the MUSIC standard. All brand promises should be memorable, distinct, uncomplicated and inspirational.
Establishing credibility is the key element in evaluating the brand promise. The brand promise should include verifiable evidence.
For example, if you are confident in claiming that you are the most reliable platform on the market, you should back it up with measurable public uptime metrics. Otherwise, your statement will be incomplete and unable to be substantiated by empirical data produced by your internal teams.
B2B Brand Promise Examples: Partnering Operations With Sales
The B2B purchasing process is built around the process of risk management associated with software and services like Datadog and HubSpot. It relies heavily on the need for guarantees regarding the security of data, speed of deployment and long-term support.
As an example of these types of commitments:
1. Datadog
Promise: "See inside any stack, any app, at any scale, anywhere."
This is quite the technical challenge. Datadog must deliver full transparency and oversight for engineering teams managing highly complex cloud-like environments.
In order to deliver this level of transparency, Datadog will need to develop integrations with hundreds of third-party tools. If a new database technology is released into the marketplace, Datadog will need to create an integration as soon as the new product becomes available to ensure that they can fulfill their promise.
2. HubSpot
Promise: "Help millions of companies grow better."
This brand promise focuses on the benefit of improving long-term outcomes rather than providing short-term benefits from software features. HubSpot's commitment to this brand promise is to provide hundreds of free business educational materials.
To help HubSpot fulfill their brand promise, the software must remain user-friendly, allowing companies to quickly and easily begin using the software without being burdened by set-up. Additionally, HubSpot's customer success teams are held accountable for helping clients achieve revenue growth, not simply for providing them with software.
3. Calendly
Promise: "Easy scheduling ahead."
Calendly built a huge company on the principle of simplicity. The target audience for this brand promise is the individual who has grown tired of an endless cycle of email chains related to scheduling.
Agreement between Calendly and end-users would require instant synchronization with Google, Outlook, and Apple calendars without the risk of error. It is necessary for the application to allow a first-time customer to schedule a conference call without needing any training.
4. Medtronic
The Commitment: "Engineering the extraordinary to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life."
Purchasers of medical devices placed a high premium on the level of accuracy and security with which the hardware functions. Any failure will lead to the loss of life.
Medtronic upholds its commitment by investing heavily into clinical research and allowing their internal quality assurance teams to stop production lines if any safety metric drops below 0.5%.
5. Square
The Commitment: "Empowering small businesses and entrepreneurs with financial tools and services that are accessible, innovative, and user-friendly."
Square works with small retail owners who are technically challenged and needs to be able to work with the word accessible very importantly in their branding.
Square provides hardware that connects directly into a standard mobile device. A small retailer can be ready to process customer payments in just five minutes without having to contact IT or go to the bank.
Consumer Brand Promise Examples: Managing High Volume
Unlike commercial brands, consumer companies must provide the same experience to millions of people every day in hundreds of countries.
1. Volvo
The Commitment: "Safety for all.”
Volvo does not offer the fastest or most luxurious vehicles. They offer you a better chance of surviving an accident.
Volvo has demonstrated their commitment to the safety of everyone by the decades of safety engineering and crash testing they conducted. They also proved this by providing the patent for the three-point seatbelt at no cost.
2. FedEx
The Commitment: "Overnight delivery. Guaranteed."
Delivering this requires a massive fleet of airplanes, highly efficient sorting facilities, and complex weather tracking. If a package arrives late, they refund the money, proving the guarantee has actual financial stakes.
3. Geico
The Commitment: "15 minutes or less can save you 15% or more on car insurance."
Geico combines a specific time limit with a specific financial outcome. This removes all ambiguity from the buying process.
Their entire website and call center infrastructure is built for speed. The quote process is stripped of unnecessary questions so customers can hit the time target consistently.
4. Zappos
The Commitment: "A WOW customer experience."
Zappos promises extreme service in a category normally known for cheap, basic transactions. They use support as a primary marketing channel.
Call center agents do not have time limits on their calls. The company offers free shipping and a 365-day return policy to eliminate any buyer hesitation.
5. Amazon
The Commitment: "Earth's most customer-centric company."
Amazon prioritizes the buyer over the supplier at every turn. This promise dictates their entire supply chain and web layout.
They invest heavily in logistics to make fast delivery a standard reality. Customer reviews are completely open, forcing sellers to maintain high product quality.
Mapping Touchpoints for Your Brand Promise
Studying the best brand promise examples shows it is vital for leaders to create a roadmap outlining all customer touchpoints. This ensures that the commitment is actively delivered in the real world.
Service Level Agreements
Each department must have a measurable target that reinforces the overall brand promise. For example, if your company promotes "effortless experiences," it is essential that you track customer efforts.
When browsing the website, customers need to find what they are looking for within three clicks. The support team should resolve any issues with one email reply without requiring the customer to repeat themselves.
Plans by Industry
Each of the business types will require markedly different proof points. For example, a SaaS company may use reliability indicators such as publicly available uptime status pages and rapid deployment to demonstrate reliability.
Conversely, a direct-to-consumer apparel company may use a generous return policy and speedy delivery metrics as proof of product quality. Alternatively, a luxury services brand may use personal concierge availability and exclusive access to unseen inventory to provide evidence of exclusivity.
Failure and Recovery: When Companies Miss the Mark
No company on Earth is "perfect." Vendors have systems that go down, broken supply chains, and lengthy customer service queues.
The way a company responds to the issue resulting from these failures will determine if they develop a long-lasting trust.
Policy and Price Changes
When a vendor does something to break their agreement with a customer regarding core policies (e.g., an e-commerce returns policy), they are breaking an implicit contract.
In order to remedy that action and to reestablish trust, the vendor must communicate the changes months prior to the implementation of the change. In addition, a vendor must clearly communicate the specific reason for the change, as well as providing a grace period to allow loyal customers ample time to make the necessary adjustments.
Managing Service Interruptions
When critical technology goes offline or unavailable for a B2B customer, that vendor is likely to lose money. When businesses rely upon vague error messages to hide their mistakes, they lose immediate credibility.
The leading companies in the world provide real-time status updates detailing the status of the system failures, and the name of the person who is working on fixing the issue. When an issue has been repaired, they will publicly explain what happened and how they plan to ensure that the same situation does not occur again.
The Architecture of Trust: Building Around a Core Guarantee
Trust is not built through clever marketing or season-based promotions. Rather, trust is developed through focus, consistency, and accountability in executing on your core guarantees.
The leading companies in the world strategically align each hiring decision, software update, and support policy against a measurable standard. If both marketing and operations use the same numerical goal, then the promise of the brand becomes a physical reality.
Leaders who use their promise as a blueprint for success will outperform competitors who view it as a creative writing assignment.
Q&A: Navigating Brand Commitments and Bottlenecks
How do you test a promise prior to launching it into the marketplace?
You test the promise against the current operational processes, rather than against your marketing budget. Review your current customer journey and determine if your support, product, and sales staff can deliver the level of value that you promise to your customer. If fulfilling your new promise will require adding a significant number of staffing resources, your promise will be a liability rather than a strategic asset.
What is the fastest way for a company to get employees to align their behavior with the new promise to the customer?
Incentivize employees’ performance and use the new promise to create a direct correlation between providing speed and receiving performance-based customer service bonuses that are associated with the speed of your employees’ resolution times. When employees are compensated based upon the outcomes of their daily actions, the internal alignment of the employee with the new promise happens quickly.
How will changes to your roadmap affect your current market promise?
Every new feature or service that a company adds to its product offering must be evaluated through a strict brand filter. If an added software update makes a brand that has previously promised simplicity more complex or difficult to use and understand, that update has diminished the original asset. Roadmap development should prioritize the development of tools that expedite delivery of the existing promise and lower the cost to deliver.