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How well aligned is your brand to the needs and changing world of your target consumers?
07 February 2025
Why clarity about the essence of your brand’s promise is so important
By Jon Wilkins
In this six-part series we will be exploring the key success factors that are likely to shape the fortunes of your brand. We draw on the latest behavioural science and proven brand metrics, as well as our experience of effectively measuring thousands of brands across four decades. Together, these key factors represent the ingredients needed to help shape and grow brands successfully.
In our first two articles we looked at the importance of your brand’s Salience and Accessibility. This feature will explore why your brand’s Promise is so fundamentally important. No matter how salient and accessible your brand is to someone, if they don’t believe it’s able to meet a rationally or emotionally relevant need, they are unlikely to buy it.
Successful brands are those that are good at meeting a need that is obvious, real and meaningful, but that the consumer is unable (or unwilling) to address in some other way.
Ensuring you have a value proposition that is clear, concise and speaks directly to your target consumer, is pivotal to achieving a strong brand promise. It represents the key benefit you offer consumers. Get the value proposition right and everything else in your marketing strategy falls into place.
Whilst your positioning may define how your brand differentiates itself within its competitive landscape, your Promise goes further than this. It focuses on the specific benefits that make your product or service more relevant to your target market than other realistic alternatives.
Clarity on your value proposition is a fundamental building block for clearly and consistently communicating your brand’s promise in everything that you do.
The Promise behind your value proposition can take many forms
Every brand and proposition is different. Here we highlight twelve of the most common forms of value proposition that brand owners can consider.
Some are inherently more rooted in meeting an emotional need, typically through brand benefits. Others are more about directly satisfying a rational need, more likely through product benefits. Some of the most powerful value propositions work at both levels, addressing both rational and emotional needs.
- Convenience: How your solution simplifies processes, reduces friction and makes your customer’s life easier. Perhaps via a unique feature or perhaps simply due to superior usability. Uber, Amazon and Airbnb provide good examples of this.
- Productivity: How your product or service helps users do something more easily or efficiently, saving time and effort. Think Google smart speakers, HelloFresh meal subscriptions or Stihl robot mowers.
- Compatibility: How your product or service works well with other things. An iphone owner may buy accessories or apps that they believe work particularly well with iOS and the Apple ecosystem for example.
- Experience: Emphasises the exceptional customer experience your product or service provides each of your customer segments. Particularly relevant for service brands that excel in their sectors such as First Direct Bank, Octopus Energy or John Lewis.
- Functionality: Enables them to do something or address a problem that they cannot do as well via another alternative. This could be completing a household job, remedying a health condition, or any other task that they need to achieve.
- Trust: Being trusted by customers because you do something more reliably, safely or reduce risk more than other alternatives. Think more reliable ISPs, trusted banks, safer car brands or more secure AV software.
- Status: How the aesthetics, quality or style make a statement about the kind of person you are. Think fashion brands, home furnishing, technology we use or the car we drive.
- Purpose: The product or service is founded around a distinct purpose that goes beyond simply providing the product or service in question e.g. Patagonia, Naked Wines or Body Shop.
- Information: Any product or service that satisfies their need for information, from news, to education or guidance on how to solve a problem.
- Price: This can be as simple as providing more value for the same/ better price, but could also extend to better price guarantees (never knowingly undersold), tools like comparison sites that help you find the best prices available (e.g. Compare the Market) or discount retailers (e.g. Costco).
- Terms: Offering attractive terms or deals that may avoid unpopular restrictions that other brands impose or perhaps offer greater flexibility to customise the terms to suit your needs Think car leases schemes, mobile phone contracts or mortgages.
- Profitability: How your solution directly increases revenue or reduces costs. Something that is more relevant to brands offering B2B solutions or with commercial application. Examples include Accounting software that automates more of bookkeeping processes or online marketplaces that give you access to a much broader pool of potential buyers.
Why clarity of your proposition matters
If you don’t already have one, there’s no short-cut for developing your own value proposition. The time and effort will be wisely invested, ensuring your communication and targeting is laser-focused and consistent in all channels.
By definition, every good value proposition should be unique to each brand. You may need to develop yours through a combination of internal discussion, reviewing existing insight, new research of your target market and testing of potential propositions.
Four key steps to a compelling Brand Promise
Distilling your value proposition into a brief, clear and compelling brand promise can be done in four steps, starting with identifying the need, opportunity or pain point that your brand is uniquely placed to address.
- Identify the ‘insight’. Describe the situation or dilemma (a need, pain point or opportunity) and what the perfect situation might look like.
- Define the ‘benefit’ of your product and/ or brand. Think about both the rational and emotional benefit that may apply.
- Explain the ‘Reasons to believe’ (RtBs). These should be directly led by the product/ brand benefits; a handful of substantive reasons that connect back to the main ‘insight’.
- Spell out the ‘discriminator’. Highlight why your brand is uniquely able to address their needs, the opportunity or pain points in a way that others cannot do at all (or at least don’t do as well).
Understand, define, test and measure
Using these steps will help you arrive at a brand promise that resonates with your target audience's needs and desires. However, it’s also important to root this in an understanding of your consumer that enables you to step into their shoes, empathise and speak to what they value most. Taking a consumer-centric view at every stage of the process will not only help define your proposition, but also turn it into a compelling brand promise.
- Understand: Review existing knowledge and insight that you already have access to and use fresh research to plug any gaps this leaves and if necessary, update understanding.
- Define: Draw on the available insight to fully define your consumer’s needs and pain points and understand the emotional and rational drivers behind it. Use proposition development research if necessary to inform and refine your thinking.
- Test: Once you have developed one or more potential propositions, run them past real consumers through proposition/ concept testing and brand positioning research. Surface points of confusion or misunderstanding that you had not anticipated.
- Measure: Once you have defined and rolled out your chosen proposition, measure, measure, measure! Use regular research such as Brand Tracking or other consumer research to ensure that your proposition is working as intended and determine how you can flex different aspects.
The bottom line
No matter how salient and accessible your brand is to someone, it needs to be good at meeting a need that is obvious, real and meaningful. Consumer understanding needs to be at the heart of any process that develops your brand’s value proposition and distilling this into a clear, relevant and compelling Brand Promise. Once in-market, regular measurement such as Brand Tracking has a key role to play in checking how well the brand’s promise is being delivered and ensuring it remains relevant and competitive.
Coming next
Look out for the next instalment in this series where we will be examining how critical the Brand Experience is to the future of success of your brand.
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Helping businesses of all shapes and sizes to grow and nurture brands through more effective use of research and insight is what we do. Get in touch via the button below if you would like to start a no-obligation conversation about how we can help you achieve smarter insights that give your brand the edge, or to find out more about our BrandQi™ framework?
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