Before we dive into specifics, I want to first relieve you of some fog that may be hanging around this topic.

Your brand promise is not your tagline.

It’s not a slogan, a value proposition, a USP or a vision, values or mission statement.

You don’t have to look hard on Google to find an article suggesting that Nike’s promise is to “Just Do It” or that McDonald’s promise is “I’m Lovin It.”

Let’s cut to the chase here.

If I were to say to you, “I’m gonna promise you something” and you said, “Ok, what?”… then I replied with “Just do it,” you’d say to me, “Eh… that’s not a promise”.

And you’d be right… it’s not.

Now, if I were to promise that I have “the world’s most refreshing beer,” that’d be a different story, right?

So, what is a brand promise, then?

The Video Breakdown

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Brand Promise Is An Extension Of Your Brand Position

When building a brand, one of the most important exercises you’ll undertake is developing your positioning strategy.

Here you’ll define who your audience is on a detailed level.

You’ll analyse your competitors to look for gaps in the market.

And then you’ll define the difference you’ll make in their lives.

These are the building blocks with which you will identify the position in the mind of your audience you’ll want to occupy, which will represent a certain experience your audience can expect to receive.

Philip Kotler, the “Father of Modern Marketing,” defined positioning as

“the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market.”

The difference your brand makes in the lives of your audience is what the audience places in their mind, while the promise (literal or not) is the brand experience the audience will receive in delivering that difference.

That means that whether the brand makes a specific promise or not, stating the difference it will make in the lives of their customers is a promise to deliver on that experience.

Brand Promise vs Positioning Statement

The brand position represents the difference you want your audience to remember your brand for,

which is initially articulated in the brand positioning statement.

The statement outlines the critical elements you want your audience to understand (not remember) about your brand, which include:

The Audience

The challenge / pain-point

The Key Benefit

Competitive Alternative

Point of Difference

Though you define what you want your audience to understand through this statement, the statement itself is not written as a template or a piece of marketing for your target audience to consume.

It’s not a promise and it’s not a tagline.

Instead, this simple and clear statement guides your stakeholders through the brand development and external communication and its detail is weaved throughout customer-facing material from taglines to websites to brochures.

The brand promise, on the other hand (whether it’s a literal promise or not), is customer-facing.

An effective brand promise either states or suggests that, rather than just receiving a point of difference, the customer will receive an overall experience in the delivery of that difference (which goes beyond just the position taken in the market by the brand).

The fact is, most successful brands never articulate a customer-facing promise.

They’ll start with a clear brand identity. Then, develop a brand positioning statement to define their difference, then a tagline to plant the seed of that difference in their audience’s mind.

But doesn’t that mean that the brand promise is the tagline??? No.