Curating Your Brand Promise

Through my career, I've had the distinct pleasure to work for some amazing brands, in roles ranging from intern to brand manager to head of experience architecture.  While I still have much to learn, I've picked up a few things worth taking into account during my time with such iconic brands as The Ritz-Carlton Club, Marriott, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Mercury Marine, and others.  I'll focus here on what is referred to as either "Brand Promise" or "Brand Story" - that sum of the thoughts, emotions and expectations a given brand evokes among one or more customers in the marketplace...

1.  Each customer defines your brand - your efforts only influence but do not define that set of perspectives, as they're filtered through each customer's unique set of preconceived notions, biases, and the context in which they are exposed to those messages.

2.  The brand promise begins with initial awareness for each customer, and evolves with each customer touchpoint throughout the lifecycle.  Their brand perception changes and expands in solidity as they move through the consideration stage and to purchase, use, and post-use stages of that lifecycle.

3.  Whether a touchpoint is intentionally crafted by the corporate owner of that brand or not is irrelevant, as every touchpoint evolves the brand's story for that customer.  It doesn't matter if it's a pricey piece of marketing collateral you spent months developing or a social media review they happened to see or a phone call with your customer service department, each impacts the overall perspective for that customer.

4.  The relative impact of a given touchpoint on overall brand perception is directly proportional to the level of emotional relevance for that customer at that touchpoint.  A bad experience with the brand during a moment of high anxiety or high excitement, as in the arrival experience at a tropical resort, will have a dramatically greater impact on the perception of the brand than a calm moment, like, as an example, a verbal interaction with a representative of that brand during the initial consideration phase.

5.  Any perceived inconsistencies between a brand's promise and actual customer experience reduces the customer acceptance of that brand.  If your marketing message promises a luxury experience, but your purchase experience is not well executed, your purchase propensity and valuation will suffer accordingly.  Similarly, if your product has gaps and limitations directly at odds with your brand promise, your market share and customer experience will fall further than if you'd own up to your limitations throughout the awareness and marketing phases. 

6.  If you don't tell your brand story, loudly and often, your customers will make up that brand story on their own... at your peril.  The best brands understand the value of crafting and curating a marketing experience through multiple and overlapping channels to drive desired consumer behavior in predictable ways and with predictable timing.   CPG brands understand that print and online marketing, social media messaging, product packaging, actual product usage, and third party stories need to be consciously curated in a single, cohesive brand story... exposing their customers to as many as 30 discrete (often subliminal) touchpoints in a given day!

7.  Typically 50%-70% of the customer perception of your product happens outside the actual usage of the product, typically in the awareness-consideration-purchasing phases.  Diet Mountain Dew doesn't really taste that good and the night's rest you get at a Ritz-Carlton isn't really all that different from the hours of rest you get at a Courtyard, but I'm highly loyal to both and have very high perceptions because of what the brands evoke in my mind.

8.  How a brand recovers is also critically important.  A lot of studies have shown that a customer whose issues are taken care of quickly and in line with their expectations of that brand are more loyal than the average customer whose never had a problem.  This is where having your processes buttoned up and your front line empowered to take fast, appropriate action is mission critical.

While there's exceptions to every rule, these 8 are fairly universal, transcending geographic and generational differences.   I hope you find these thoughts helpful!