« Interesting Week 24 of 2009 | Main | Results follow understanding »
No, it is NOT. I've made this argument before, but as I watch even more organizations, and entire industries, drown in their own irrelevance - Six Flags being the most notable, recent causality - I feel compelled to say it again. A brand is not a promise; it's an expectation.
"But 'promise' is just a word, a definition." Hardly. It's your world view. It conditions your sensibilities and behavior. It represents a much simpler, outdated marketplace model, not today's complex, rapidly changing environment. And it's killing you.
What changes first: Customers' desires and expectations of brands in the marketplace, or an organization's ability to change its "promise" and strategically appeal to those changing desires and expectations?
Exactly. The outside world of the customer changes first and, unfortunately, more frequently than most organizations' ability to change. A brand is the customer's evolving expectation of value; value the way he or she subjectively intuits it. It is NOT your slow-to-change, inside-out declaration or "promise."
The day you finally understand this distinction is the day you become obsessed with the changing world of your audience, and paranoid about your organization's ability to keep up, add value, and stay relevant and interesting.
But if you resist the change, if you continue to speak yesterday's language, you are unwittingly sustaining yesterday's ineffective actions. To succeed and achieve your dreams, you must choose words and thinking that tune you in to today's world and today's challenges.
And today, your "promise" is meaningless to customers. They want . . . no they expect and demand value.
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c684b53ef0115710e7116970b
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference A brand is a promise:
The comments to this entry are closed.
(Rest assured, we will never provide your email address to anyone. Period.)
RSS feed
Tom on Twitter
@tomasacker
Tom is timely, thought provoking and all about the new brand vision packaged as a Seinfeld stand up. I went to school on his ideas.
Jeff Taylor, Founder, Monster.com and CEO, Eons.
Tom.
Great post and with your permission I would like to repost it on my blog in a different context, that of the public sector and specifically, policing.
I think that there is a debate to be had here about lagging expectation and whether the public now expect a business service from policing or a service that upholds a more traditional perspective (values driven) but delivered in a business like way. Promise v Expectation OR Promise (values) and expectation.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Alderson | June 16, 2009 at 09:38 AM