Branding is all about what the customers perceive of your business. Your brand is the promise that you intend to make to the customers.
That is the whole of it, and it is why branding cannot be finished by a designer. The perception is produced by ordinary contact: how quickly a message is answered, whether the price quoted is the price charged, what happens when something goes wrong. A customer assembles a brand out of those events whether or not the company intended to supply one.
Writing the promise
A usable promise is short, specific and testable. It says what a customer can count on every time, not what the company aspires to. If a sentence could be printed on a competitor's page without changing meaning, it is not yet a promise.
Keeping it
- Check that the promise survives the busiest week of the year, not the quietest.
- Make sure everyone who meets a customer knows the sentence.
- Fix the operation before changing the artwork.
- Say plainly when the promise is broken, and say what happens next.
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