What is a “brand promise”? It’s simply what it says it is, a promise from the brand to its customer. They are shaped by many factors. The brand offer, the marketplace it operates in, the capability of the brand and in some cases the promises of competing brands.
Great brand promises elicit emotion from the customer and the type of emotion will be different, depending on the sector. For example a retail brand should make its customers feel good. Luxury brands may deepen that feeling to excitement making their heartbeat faster. In sharp contrast, a B2B brand promise usually focuses on reassurance or value to ensure their customers feel any perceived risk is reduced.
Promises matter. If the brand doesn’t deliver what it promises then the brand will cease to matter to the very people it is trying to engage.
Making the promise is the easy bit. Keeping it is the hard part, especially in the hospitality and catering sector, which has some of the highest staff to customer ratios but some of the lowest employee engagement scores. In this sector brand owners need to work really hard to engage all of their employees.
After working with our clients to position their brand, we then work to ensure their employees are aligned with the brand promise. Tactics range, depending on the client but include: access to CEO; participation in brand positioning workshops; involvement in brand communications brainstorming; employee reward and recognition schemes; building brand communication into employee appraisal; regular staff surveys etc. Our tactics list is extensive but the aim is simple: the more your employee is involved in what the brand stands for, the more they understand and the better equipped they are at delivering it to the customer.Summed up simply by an old Chinese proverb that says “tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand”.
Braver brands take this to the next level. They don’t just involve their employees they allow their employees to make decisions that support the brand promise – and these decisions are often crucial at critical times of service recovery.
A great example of this is seen regularly at Poncho8 a Mexican burrito chain whose brand promise of “Mexican Made Fresh” meant that at busy lunchtimes customers have to queue. Frustration is alleviated and the brand promise is reinforced, by providing free sample nachos to loyal queuing customers. At re-launch, the same chain actively encouraged you to “talk to frank”. Frank is the joint founder and MD and he published his mobile number on the website to deal immediately and personally with customer feedback.
Currently there is a clear enough distinction between aligning customer experience with brand promise and the rewards given to brand loyal customers through loyalty schemes. But as we move increasingly quickly, to a customer-driven society where every experience, good and bad, is published instantly, for the world to comment, like or share, rewards, perks and privileges will become an integral part of the hospitality and catering sector. Perkonomics may well be the next chapter, but customer loyalty will always begin with a great brand experience, and a great brand experience is when the brand promise has been delivered or exceeded.
I commend the hotel that has upgraded me because I hold a loyalty card. I am delighted by the birthday cake that has arrived at my table or been left in my hotel room because someone has actually used collected available data to build brand engagement. But I still dream about the day a hotel reservation system asks for my shoe size so my size 14’s can slip into something more comfortable than a “large”.
The importance of aligning guest experience with brand promise, by Jeff Conrad, Managing Director, The Council
