Apr 25, 2017
Is it time to put your brand promise to work?
Is technical and functional proficiency enough to sustain and build your brand? Admittedly, it’s vastly important that your elevator maintenance crews not make mistakes. But, ultimately, customers don’t keep choosing you only because you don’t make mistakes. They engage with you because you also offer a positively memorable experience. This experience is what we call the brand promise and it is what separates adequate companies from the true market leaders.
Especially in consumer-facing businesses or B2B enterprises with a heavy service component, your team always has the option of wrapping what you’re selling (and adding value) with your brand promise. But they can only do it if they know what your brand promise is and how important it is to continually promote it.
A brand promise is the foundation of your bond with customers.
Essentially, it is who you are, in addition to what you do. Like any other promise, your brand promise establishes an expectation. Traditionally, training courses prepare your people to deliver on the functional… “We said we’d deliver six dozen by Thursday, and here they are.” Educating your people to become brand ambassadors takes a more strategic and sustained training approach that links your people with your corporate strategic plan and focuses on relationships rather than transactions.
Instilling brand promise across your company takes more than formal training events. It also depends on informal learning through follow-up conversations, team building moments, employee communications and recognition for ambassadorial behaviour with customers.
Developing brand ambassadors should begin during the hiring and on-boarding process. Your recruitment team must build an understanding of the greater strategic goals of your organization from day one. It’s great to have people with diverse skill-sets, backgrounds and personalities on a team, but it’s also important to have values that align with one another and with those of your company. Hiring for ‘fit’ (in addition to credentials) isn’t simple, but it’s the single most important ingredient in keeping your brand promise. When you hire kindred people, the on-boarding and brand indoctrination processes follow much more naturally.
After all, believing in the promise makes it that much easier to keep the promise.
Category: Blog, Icicle, Spyder Works
