Episode 8: Brand Promise

Marissa: Welcome to Brand Frontlines. Today we're talking about brand promise. I'm Marissa La Brecque, founder of Hyperflore.

Eric: And I'm Eric La Brecque, principal of Applied Storytelling, a story-based brand communications consulting firm.

M: Today, we're covering brand promise. We spoke in the previous three episodes about brand personality and archetypes and brand positioning, which are the other of the three P's.

What Is A Brand Promise?

E: Yeah, as we call them. So they're kind of the primary colors. If you dive back into the content that we've got up on the site, you'll find a piece that shows the Brand Wheel, which is the organizing idea for how we build brand stories and one ring, the second ring out from the center or actually it's the first ring from the center has the promise the positioning and the personality in it and these are almost like the primary colors. Once you have them kind of figured out you can build everything else by working with these core insights. If you don't have them, , you're going to be working at a deficit moving forward. So they're really fundamental, and this is the third of the three of them.

M: Yeah, so we'll share exactly what a brand promise is and or what we think of brand promises, and how we get there in the process of building a brand and we'll share some examples of promises that we find very successful and some that we think are really off the mark. And so you can you can get a better feel for it. in the meantime, Eric, what are you up to that up to today? You've been on the phone a lot.

E: Yeah, I started early. The two big things. We presented a messaging deck today, targeted audience messaging. So the general messaging is sort of what applies to everybody. It’s messaging you might use for like a general business audience. Today we dove into messaging for four different personas for this one client. Personas being sort of the way they summarize a type of buyer or a user. And a really important lesson from this actually was we've got some syncing up to do. The terms that we're using are not the same as the terms that they use. They’ve gone pretty far down this path themselves with their sales force. So they've got a lot of sales messaging already, and we're going to be working to sync it up from here on out. So some stitch work… The second conversation was a new business pitch for a cultural institution. Today we showed them actual deliverables, which is a lot right now. I mean, it's tempting to show just the finish work but they want to know well, what are the things what are the things look like that we are actually going to be getting? And so we share some of that. What about you up to today?

M: I’m the land of communication. I've been in strategy land for a couple months, but yeah, I'm working with a bunch of clients who I've already worked on strategy with and now , writing site copy for one client, I'm working on taglines for another client. I'm creating a social media strategy for a third client that's a climate news aggregator, so we're finding ways to get people to come from social to their site, become subscribers and all the challenges that go with that so yeah, so brand getting real

E: That's great. I was actually thinking about , what's our promise? I don't know that you and I sat down and formally worked out a promise for Brand Frontlines, but I was thinking about something that you said yesterday, about how you wanted to do a little piece about how this isn't the light, listicle version of what brands can do. We're getting a little technical or going a little bit in-depth. And I guess if I was going to whip together a promise, just to throw out there. It seems to me that the promise is: if you listen, then you're going to get into the real nitty gritty of a story-based approach to brand building. you'll acquire the skills to build brands that way. So there you go. It was great to do that exercise. And it has a lot of the things in it that I think we look for in a promise.

The way I like to think of a promise, is if the brand were a person, and it could speak to you, what would it be saying to entice you to choose it, to engage with it. Usually that takes the form of a very simple statement. Usually, there's not even a comma in it. And it can feel like a call to action. It doesn't have to be but, , choose me and I'll do this for you. is kind of the idea, I think. You see promises out there that are a little bit too long. I guess they can be a little bit short, too. But a promise can be a single word or idea. Southwest Airlines: low fares. They may have a better way of saying that but I think that actually is their promise.

M: So we talked about how there's so many things that a brand would like to deliver to you. Using the Southwest example, I'm sure that they have a lot of values and ideas around customer service and how the plane feels and all these other things that are about how you experience your plate, right but but the most important one that all the other ones roll into is the brand promise.

E: Yeah, that's what we'd say. It's worth trying to find it sometimes. It's challenging. Because you really want to think about specific audiences and what exactly you want to say to them and it's not always that top level thing. But whatever those more specific promises are. And again, this is what was I was working on this morning. You can kind of see them as a family around this overarching idea. And so the question becomes, well, where do I go for that overarching idea? Who's that general person? We like to think of it as this sort of shared understanding that anybody in business— if we're talking about a business brand— would have or any consumer, whatever their specific goal or interest would have over and above that? And one of the guideposts for that is actually the positioning. So that thing that sets the brand apart that unique point of difference that your brand can own and claim better than anybody else, generally lends itself to a promise that's right in line with the positioning and the promise are very close to each other. And to the degree that some people say promises just a way of expressing a positioning wouldn't quite make it that close, but it's pretty close. And that's actually I think, one thing that can get you into trouble a little bit is there are a lot of things that are promised. The tagline can be a promise too. And the work to kind of tease those apart is is important. It's worth doing. Even at the end, even if in the end you decide look, the promise statement that we have is really great. We want to use it as our tagline- try to keep things separate before you decide to merge them together would be one recommendation I have.

M: Yeah, so we, like you said at the top we dig deeper into positioning in a previous episode but the promise speaks to the customer's pain point, that unmet need,

E: Yeah, they might experience it as pain, or they might experience as a frustrated desire. Or something that just isn't as fulfilling or satisfying as it could be. So there's a range of pain, right from things that truly cause pain that need to be solved an urgent way to things that we just like to have better in our lives and the promise could fall anywhere along that range depending on what category of business you're in, and what exactly it is you're bringing to market.

M: You’ve said positioning is an idea. Promise is a value.

E: So again, you're telling a story, right? And that promise is something you keep coming back to, as you're telling the story. b\But any good story has multiple themes. It has its driving theme and that's kind of aligned with a promise, and then it has these other themes. So, I might be a brand that's all about innovation. And my promise is probably going to be about that. But it turns out that I want to talk about human connections. And I want to talk about who knows what else I want to talk about simplicity. And I want to talk about performance in some way. And those all have value propositions that go along with them too. But they fall underneath what we're calling the promise.

M: They’re the next ring up. Another thing I love that you've shared is that you should take the word promise at face value. It's an emotional word. It's something that you are promising to your customers, and you should deliver on that. So when you're articulating it, it should be something that you can deliver on all the time.

E: You’ve got to make sure that you're going to be able to do that right. And that's where promises around innovation can be kind of tough ones. Not that you shouldn't do it, but you're setting a high bar for yourself to continuously offer something. If you're promising the most innovative this or that you've got to really make sure your product development strategy, your product pipelines, can are going to keep coming through for you. There are many ways your story can turn pear shaped, and one of them is to fail to deliver on your promise. Obviously that breaks the spell of the story. It breaks the sense of trust that you've worked to build. So yeah, you've got to be really careful about that. And do take it literally, as you say, is so important.

M: So let's talk about process. We start with competitive research, looking at all the other value propositions that are out there and who's delivering on them and who's messaging around them. And then trying to find the promise amongst those.

E: Right, the needle in the haystack. Sometimes it's easy to find it. The promise is, I mean, it's different from a positioning in this regard. It is often the public message. Like again, sometimes it can be turned into a tagline but, we're looking for it often like on the on the homepage of a website or the title or the lead page of a pitch deck is a good place to look. Not everybody puts it there though. So then you have to dig. One of the things that we end up doing quite often is creating what we call a value proposition inventory. This gets into messaging too, but we just look at every single thing. A brand is offering something that everybody offers because it's kind of price of entry, some things that stand out, and we'll make some judgment calls based on that sometimes if we can't see the promise clearly through the messaging trees. We kind of do that and and look at other brands and triangulate.

M: Yeah, so you're triangulating on what's coming through internally, positioning and personality and vision and all these things and then what you're finding in the field that's available and finding the most prominent deliverable that is true.

E: Yeah, because again, I think the strongest promise is one that sounds different. It is a message. So even for something like low fares, I mean, I guess if that was your literal message, and you're gonna pound that home, it's strong because it's very direct, but it's also something that other folks might say, This goes back to the positioning. If you're going to own low fares and fight for low fares, then make that your promise, but it's a tough battleground, in that case.

M: In some crowded spaces, promise can be less important because a lot of people might have the same promise. It might be hard to stand out in that regard. And so in that case, you might lean more heavily on personality.

E: Yeah, you're still gonna want to be clear about your promise, though. Even if it's one that doesn't feel all that different from others, it should still be very clear what the value is that you're delivering. I should get why you exist in the world. I should know what it is that I can buy from you and what it's going to do for me. So even in situations where it's not doing all the heavy lifting, of setting your brand apart, you're still going to want to work on it. And again, you might use style you might use how it's written to set yourself apart. I found an example actually, that kind of makes that point that it kind of goes to process a little bit too. So we recently did some work for a video game company. It's a fairly big company. And one thing that's a little different about them is that they don't really need to promise all that much to the world at large, like many content creator brands, the promise is kind of in the experience that you're delivering. It’s in the game, right? So if the game delivers well on what it's supposed to be about that's kind of your promise. But where the promise matters to these folks is in talent attraction. So they want to make sure they've got the best folks on board and it's obviously super competitive. So we worked on a promise for them and the most generic version came out like this, ‘Build your career here, creating some of the best video games ever.’ The quality is important. And you're going to build your career there. So it's not just transactional. So that's kind of a generic feeling thing, but maybe it works. One of the points is that we're providing options, right? So we might provide options in terms of different ideas if we're not absolutely clear on what comes off the positioning. And we might deliver options based on tone so you can dial up the flavor of that to something like ‘Because it's your life's work.’ Alright, so I'm talking to you and I say because it's your life's work, right? I'm the brand and I'm speaking to you and I'm appealing to your sense of mission. Your sense of pride, your sense of purpose, with a little bit of art. And you could dial it up even further if you want and say ‘Get A Life. This one.’ So a little bit higher on the attitude meter there. And that's where the promise and the personality start to talk to each other a little bit. What's the right level of emotion, the right kind of emotion to catch that message and the interesting thing to look at?

M: Yeah, definitely. Like we said, this is a promise so you need to feel some emotion and feel like the brand cares about this promise and it's part of their values.

E: Right. Well, it's the theme that the story keeps coming back to and it plays a really important role in storytelling, just like the vision does. The Vision sort of sets the story in motion, you're trying to accomplish this thing. But this theme that plays across that effort that you're making, that ongoing effort is what the promise is all about. So when you look at it from a pure storytelling standpoint, has a huge role to play. Yeah, I pulled together something that I thought was interesting, in light of the idea of: What’s a good promise? What's a bad promise? And part of the answer to that question is, let's just figure out what a promise is first. I mean, there's so many different takes that people have on it. We have our idea about how it lives in the brand, how it relates to positioning, how it can talk to personality, how it relates to other value propositions, but

M: it’s always jarring to me when you do Google searches on these brand elements because if you look at brand promise, or you look up vision statement. mission statement or whatever. Most of the definitions are pretty much the same. But then when you look at companies have interpreted that they're so often wrong, even if you're talking about McDonald's, Coca Cola, whatever these huge companies that obviously have massive marketing teams, they're often not quite correct.

E: Well, yeah, or they're just playing to a different set of goals, but to your point, I pulled this list of promises. This is a little out of date. I mean, it's not 2022 Okay, but let's just go to McDonald's. Right. The promise for McDonald's, inexpensive, familiar and consistent meals delivered in a clean environment. Well, okay. That is what I expect from McDonald's. That's definitely not a message that I would expect McDonald's to be saying. So it hasn't really found its public clothing yet. It sounds like somebody else's interpretation. What McDonald's promise ought to be. This list includes BMW: the ultimate driving machine. Okay. So inexpensive, familiar and consistent meal delivering the clean environment versus the ultimate driving machine. And the thing about BMW in the ultimate driving machine I think that was a I think that was a like a campaign tagline or something. You get a sort of promise from it, just like you get a sort of promise from McDonald's. But they're very different stylistically. And I would say that one sounds like a working idea of a promise, the other sounds like a tagline that came from what we would call a well-formed promise. I'm looking at this list and it's just like all over the place. Nike to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. Well, that sounds like a vision to me.

M: And I've seen that actually listed as their version and by athlete, it has an asterisk by athlete meaning anyone with a body.

E: So, again, it's a great vision. It sounds like a great big honking vision. They're not ever necessarily going to accomplish that goal. But what does that translate to me if I'm next to a Nike shoe or a Nike shirt, and it was talking to me, is it going to say that I don't know that that would speak to me as a as an individual? I don't know that would speak to me as a class of consumers. We're trying to get to a point where as a profession, we all have a shared understanding of what these terms mean, and how they relate to each other. And clearly, we're not there yet. Geico. 15 minutes or less can save you 15% or more on car insurance. Very concrete, very specific promise. That is that wins a prize for being specific. I think if you can be concrete— great. Some taglines are not promising at all. And then you compare that on this list the same list to Tesla: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to to market Okay, that sounds like a vision statement. And again, we're not saying that Tesla has identified this as its promise, but somebody did. And somebody is not making a very consistent platform out there. This list has vision statements on it. It has taglines on it, it has positioning ideas on it. It's a mishmash. And one lesson again, is the promise influences everything. What might be helpful, at least behind the scenes, is if we keep our ducks in a row and try to build a great version of each one of these specifically before we decide which ones to drop or not use or mush together. Yeah. So kind of interesting.

M: I think a lot of even professionals get confused about the difference between a vision statement, a positioning statement and a promise. So Eric's pulled up an example of all of those from one brand that he worked on. And just to give you like a very clear distinction.

E: Yeah, sure. So, I just happened to be working with the brand guidelines for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian this morning. And they're all summarized on one page, these different things. The vision, which again, is this ultimate goal you're pursuing the ultimate impact you might want to have. Their vision is one of equity and social justice for the native peoples of the western hemisphere. So Will that ever fully come into play? Or come to pass? Maybe not, but it drives the organization forward. So that's the vision. The positioning, which sets them apart from other museums that treat with Native nations, native people is this: the National Museum of the American Indian is global in scope, relevance and impact. And you might ask, “What are you going to do for me National Museum of the American Indian?’ Well, we're not gonna promise you equity and social justice for native peoples, the Western Hemisphere, it's too big, it's too broad. It's inspiring. And as a guest, I think that's very compelling to know. I want to go on that journey with you. But that's not the promise to me. The positioning if I said, “Okay, National Museum of the American Indian, what are you going to do for me?’ and you were drawing on the positioning for an answer again, I think it wouldn't quite take me there. I'm glad that's what sets you apart. What's in it for me? And now we come to the promise, which hopefully answers that question very directly. Learn something surprising and new about your country and yourself. We were looking for a promise that would work whether you were a visitor from a native nation, and you were seeing yourself represented there, or whether you weren't, you were a visitor who was from somewhere else and had some other cultural identity or cultural background. Regardless, you will learn something surprising and new about your country and yourself. And the thing is, if you wind these three up and you look at them, they all feel like they belong together, like they fit but each one has a very specific job to do, and only one of them is really going to answer my question. What are you going to do for me?

M: If you have any other questions about brand promise, please reach out to us on our website. Until next time, see you on the frontlines.