Brand Core · Brand promise · Module
Deliverability
Whether the organisation can actually keep the promise every time — which is a question about capacity and process, not about wording.
The idea
How it works
The gap between what is promised externally and what operations can deliver is one of the named failures in the service-quality literature, and it is almost always created by people who never spoke to each other. Marketing writes the promise; operations discovers it.
The useful test is the bad day rather than the good one. A promise kept in normal conditions and broken during every peak is a promise the customer experiences as unreliable, because they encounter it during the peak too.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Cost the promise
What does keeping it require in capacity, staffing and stock? A promise nobody has costed is a promise nobody has agreed to.
- 02
Test it against the worst week
Normal conditions are not the test. Model the promise against your busiest period and your thinnest staffing.
- 03
Find where it breaks first
There is a first failure point. Naming it is what allows it to be resourced or the promise to be narrowed.
- 04
Let operations veto the wording
A promise operations did not agree to is a promise operations will not defend when it is expensive to keep.
One level in
The components of deliverability
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
Model the promise against your worst week. Customers encounter your worst week too.
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.
LearnCommunication
How the promise is stated externally, and how carefully — because overstatement is free when written and expensive when delivered.
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