SR BM tools, frameworks & inspiration
Brand Compass is a detailed guide to understanding and creating a competitive Brand Promise for any business. It is based on over 30 years of experience of creating and upgrading brands and marketing strategies for commercial clients.
understanding brand promise
My aim is to make the idea of brands and branding accessible and understandable. In the Brands Distilled Gallery I have taken some well-known brands and analysed the promise they make to their customers. I hope this is helpful.
brand compass
Brand Compass is a tool or organising framework. Its purpose is to focus management's thinking, planning and decision-making in such a way as to:
Help you pinpoint, map and prioritise customer needs and translate them into your brand-defining initiatives and activities. It is a road that can lead to building a business that is worth much more than the sum of its parts.
Move marketing planning and strategy into the concrete reality of business operations by meaningfully connecting the many activities of a business to customer needs and priorities
On one slide a business can plot the brand-defining moments of truth across the customer journey cycle. These moments are the Value Creation Points (VCPs).
A 360 degree journey around the Brand Compass represents a 4-stage customer journey.
Each quadrant signifies a 'territory' of activity that you can either control and/or influence.
VCPs are sources of brand power and should be the focal point for activity, energy and investment (Value Creation Through Brand Focus).
SR Brand Management works with you to identify your Value Creation Points. They may exist in obvious or unexpected places. The process of identifying them creates a customer and market-led focus for the whole organisation.
Brand Promise
A Brand Promise is the guiding anchor-point or benchmark by which a business sets a direction and by which its audience judges them. It sets standards to which a business holds itself accountable. The clearer and more compelling a Brand Promise is to the target audience and the more it is reinforced, the more people will understand, accept and embrace it. Truly strong brands generate meaning, triggering feelings and responses that resonate through the target audience. Clarity and unwavering consistency are the watchwords.
Brand Purchase
The Brand Purchase experience may or may not be in the control of the brand owner. It can be a perilous stage of the journey. Recognising the enablers and obstacles through the purchase process is a vital part of brand-ownership. Understanding and recognising where the value-creation points and value-destruction points are at the purchase phase can help a business make important decisions over distribution or retail and remove barriers and potentially destructive forces between you and your audience.
Brand Experience
Does the Brand Experience live up to the Brand Promise? The consonance or dissonance between the ‘promise’ and the ‘experience’ is a pivotal point where brand reputations are made and destroyed. It is the responsibility of the brand owner to deliver a brand experience that matches or exceeds the brand promise.
Taking control of the Brand Experience means giving diligent and focused attention to all the meaningful touchpoints your customers have with your products and services. This means engaging closely with all those members of staff responsible for delivering these ‘touchpoints’. The brand owners, in this regard, are often spread far and wide through an organisation. This is why brands do not belong to marketing departments.
Brand Afterglow
Your brand reputation is built by others as much as by your own efforts. A large % of your marketing and brand-building may occur without your involvement through social media sharing and reviewing, through 3rd party aggregators or word-of-mouth advocacy. This is Brand Afterglow. You may not be able to control this, but you can influence it.
brand promise
If you accept that brands are valuable commercial assets, then it is important that you understand what they are.
I have created a simple model to explain a complex, multi-faceted concept. This model deconstructs ‘brand’ into 3 components or levels. In totality, they add up to a ‘Brand Promise’. They tell the full brand story.
On a practical note, we can also see that these 3 levels are typically managed and ‘owned’ by different stakeholders in the marketing department and in other areas of a business. It immediately highlights the importance of joined-up thinking (and understanding). For example, if one of the defining connection points between a customer and a product is the tactile experience of using the product (i.e. say the design, materials and finish of the product) then the engineers and designers need to know this. They are responsible for the ‘experience’ which is driving brand strength.
All brands make a ‘Promise’ to their audiences/stakeholders. Strong brands manifest a resonating Promise on all 3 levels. A clear understanding of how your brand shows up at the 3 different levels is to really understand what makes your brand tick.
