I recently recorded a video on ‘Do you keep your promises?’. Take a look at the video and also my Business Growth YouTube channel, where there are many more videos are like this.

Transcript for Business Growth : Keeping your promises

Hi there and welcome to this Business Growth short, today I’m going to ask you a question on ‘Do you keep your promises’?

This might seem a weird thing for me to ask you but I talk with businesses when I’m helping them to develop their proposition and their positioning and talk about the promise that they are going to make to their customers or prospects about the goods or services they are going to deliver.

So, when we do brand positioning we examine a whole range of things but we boil it down to what that brand promise is. It’s really important because as marketing people we can make any promise we like but the business needs to able to deliver on that promise.

That promise really is the customer experience or the quality of the product, it has to deliver what is promised.

I saw somebody speak a couple of years ago, they used this equation to try sum up what delivering on a brand promise is about.

Now that sum is ‘Reputation = Experience minus Expectation’.

Your reputation will go up when the experience somebody has with your business is larger and better than the expectation they had.

Obviously if they have an expectation about what your business or product will deliver and you under deliver on that, that damages your reputation.

I like this, it’s a simple equation and a simple way to sum up about why it’s important for you to continually exceed people’s expectations.

The downside of continually exceeding people’s expectations is that they continue to expect a higher and higher standard from you, so what you need to do is continually deliver on your promises.

You need to make sure you can live up to the promises you make to people. If the promise that you make to people isn’t strong enough and doesn’t differentiate you as a business and doesn’t make you stand out and doesn’t help you win the business then you need to re-examine how you go about doing what you do. How you deliver the service that you have, the product you have and examine whether it’s good enough.

If it can’t compete and if it can’t put forward a compelling promise to people then you’re always going to struggle to win business and to have successful and thriving business.

The other side which has been an interesting conversation I’ve had over the past couple of months is that I’ve started doing some work with someone called Richard Kimber.

Richard is a customer experience specialist. He specialises in being able to work with businesses to define the customer journey but also to be able to measure about how well they do on delivering on the promises that they make.

So, you can see how Richard and I can work very closely together to help you define what that promise is and also help you quantify whether you can deliver on that promise.

So, I hope this has been an interesting way to think about what your brand promise is and how, what you put into your marketing material is about making a promise to your customers or prospects and then for you to understand it’s crucial that you keep the promises you make in your marketing materials.