Today we’ll be looking at making crazy good promises to increase business. Now, what does that mean? What I’m talking about here is brand promises. This is something that very few businesses do, and even fewer do extremely well.
Let me give you a few examples of some different brand promises. A brand promise can be something as simple as delivering your products on-time or ahead of schedule every single time. Another example is donating a certain percentage of all sales to a charity. So there are a lot of different brand promises out there. But here are three things to think about in regards to making your brand promise:
1. You want your brand promise to be better than your competitor’s, and you have to make it difficult for them to use the same promise. Basically, if yours is easy to achieve, if it’s too similar to your competitor’s, or can be copied without much effort, it most likely isn’t a great brand promise.
2. You have to deliver every single time. This is not a “try our best” promise. You have to be consistent. If you aren’t, that’s a huge deal. Making a mistake has to be a once-in-a-blue-moon type of thing. Because if you break your promise frequently, it could destroy your brand and really hurt your company.
3. Unlike core values, brand promises can change over time. Core values, once set, stay with you for a while, whereas brand promises come and go. For example, when FedEx first started guaranteeing overnight delivery, it changed everything. It was a wonderful brand promise that none of their competitors could match. However, over time, the competition caught up. And so that brand promise is no longer powerful because every single company in the shipping industry guarantees the same thing for the most part. What FedEx had to do was come up with a new brand promise. You also must update/improve your original brand promise over time for the sake of adapting to current market environments.
Now here’s the key to everything – tracking. This is what few people do well. Create key performance indicators for your brand. For example, if you promise to deliver on or ahead of schedule every single time, you have to have some type of tracking, something to measure whether you achieve your goal or not. This is key. When done correctly, it makes a huge impact on the business.
So go out, carve some time, and think about your brand. Decide how you’re going to measure your results. Come up with the promise and market it like crazy. Make it happen!
