What is your brand promise? Do your customers know?

People often get confused about the meaning of the word Brand. It's more than a logo or trademark. Actually, your company's brand is intangible and it's often invisible. A brand that is well positioned holds a distinctive place in the minds of customers in your target market.

Ad campaigns and slogans help shape a brand's position, but only to a limited degree. The real value of the brand is something called the brand promise.

Your brand promise is the commitment you make to your customer to deliver a certain experience to them throughout their journey with you - from shopping to ordering to delivery to billing to customer service and beyond.

Whether your company provides a product or service, you are making a commitment to the customer. You are effectively telling them, ‘In exchange for your money, here is the experience you should expect.’ This is your brand promise.

As a consumer, you probably have a certain expectation of the experience you will have when you buy from Walmart, FedEx, Netflix, Chevron, or Coca-Cola. Even from your neighborhood pizzeria, you have an expectation of the price and the quality of the product, delivery, and service.

As a company, if you meet or exceed your customer's expectation, you fulfill your brand promise. If you repeat this process with each customer and each order, word will spread in the market. Previous customers will return, maybe more frequently, maybe with higher order values. And new customers will join in for the experience.

Brand marketing managers spend a lot of effort building trust with prospective customers. Brands promote their benefits through proof points like industry awards, lab reports, third-party research data, and customer testimonials. These proof points are intended to give the prospect enough confidence to try the brand.

But only after your company fulfills your brand promise have you given your customer a true Reason To Believe. This reason to believe is customers' compelling evidence that your brand delivers on its brand promise. Customers believe you because they have already experienced your promise. They remember.

The responsibility for your brand goes way beyond marketing. Your company needs to make sure that every member of your team (manufacturing, operations, finance, etc) is working to deliver on your brand promise, giving every customer a reason to believe. Word will spread.