By Gregg Lederman, Founder and Managing Partner, Brand Integrity

 

Here's what you'll learn in this article:

1. How to stop making promises about your brand's differentiators and start delivering on them instead;

2. How to take a step-by-step approach to fulfilling your Brand's promises.

 

Does your company keep the promises that it makes, or are you killing your brand?

Too often, companies put together taglines, clever messaging, and brand promises to attract customers without preparing employees to deliver on these promises. 

These companies are wasting marketing dollars by "Branding for the Neighborhood."  They're fixing up the exterior of their company or “house” with a nice paint job, flowers and a beautiful picket fence so everything looks great just like their marketing, but they’re forgetting about what’s inside. And when customers come in, their visit isn’t what they expected – employees aren’t motivated to deliver a great experience; work processes haven’t been put in place to drive quality; and systems are lacking to foster consistency.

If you want to get the highest return on your marketing investments, take your promises off your walls, website and ads and put them into employee performance. Start this process by taking the following steps:

• Conduct research to truly understand your target customers and their desired outcomes. This will help you identify how your product or service can solve their problems.

• Use this insight to uncover what actions or experiences your employees can do to deliver meaningful points of difference to your customers.

• Translate these actions and experiences by documenting the behaviors employees must do to bring your brand to life for customers every day on the job

• Integrate these behaviors into employee systems so that you can attract and hire people who are capable of doing them, effectively onboard and train employees how to deliver them, and assess their performance regularly to hold them accountable for actually doing your brand. 

Wegman’s Food Markets is just one company that has successfully aligned its brand with employee performance to realize significant results. Instead of helping customers simply shop for groceries, employees help customers decide “What’s for dinner,” locate the best ingredients, and provide instruction on how to cook them. In satisfying the desired outcomes of their customers, the company has been able to significantly reduce its marketing budget, while increasing store visits from their best customers to 94 per year when the industry average is only 36 trips.

So, stop killing your brand, one ad at a time.  Free downloadable tools for aligning your brand with employee performance are available at www.brandintegrity.com.

Gregg Lederman, founder and managing partner of Brand Integrity and award-winning author of Achieve Brand Integrity.

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