Brand Core · Brand promise · Module
Communication
How the promise is stated externally, and how carefully — because overstatement is free when written and expensive when delivered.
The idea
How it works
Satisfaction is the distance between what was expected and what was received. That means an organisation can improve satisfaction without changing anything it does, simply by stating the promise more accurately — and can destroy it the same way.
The promise is also communicated by things that are not the promise. Pricing, design, response time and who answers the phone all set expectations, and they routinely contradict the sentence.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
State it where it is encountered
A promise on the about page and nowhere in the buying flow is not doing any work.
- 02
Under-promise deliberately, not by accident
Leaving margin is a choice with a cost in appeal and a return in trust. Make it on purpose.
- 03
Check what else sets expectation
Price, design and speed of reply promise things too, and they are believed more than the sentence.
- 04
Keep the wording identical everywhere
A promise paraphrased differently in three places is three promises, and customers will hold you to the strongest.
One level in
The components of communication
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
The expectation set
What customers actually come to expect, including from things that are not the promise.
Learn
Price, design and reply speed promise things too — and they are believed more readily than the sentence is.
The other modules in brand promise
The promise
Writing the commitment itself: narrow enough to rule something out, and phrased so that failing it would be recognisable.
LearnDeliverability
Whether the organisation can actually keep the promise every time — which is a question about capacity and process, not about wording.
LearnKeeping it
Measuring whether the promise actually holds, and what happens when it does not — because a promise with no failure record is unmeasured rather than unbroken.
Learn