Creating a Winning Brand Promise

The goal of any brand positioning exercise is to develop a brand promise that is unique, compelling and believable. Any successful brand positioning project must evaluate all potential brand promises against these three criteria – unique, compelling and believable. The winning promise must deliver against all three criteria or it won’t work. The only way to assess this is to measure each of these for each brand promise option with each key target audience.

As an example, we explored the following potential brand promises for Rochester, New York. This is how one target audience, current residents, evaluated them:

Potential Brand Promise	Explanation	Unique	Compelling	Believable
Gateway to the Finger Lakes	Closest city to the Finger Lake wine region	High	High	Very high
Small town feel, big city culture	Medium sized city with friendly people, unusually large concentration of cultural institutions and events for a city its size, largest number of cultural workers per capita	Medium	High	Very High
Where everything is only 20 minutes away	Generally true and often repeated, due to smaller size of metropolitan area, extensive highway system and lack of traffic	Medium	High	Extremely High
Imaging capital of the US	Major base for Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, CooperVision and dozens of other imaging companies, University of Rochester & RIT have unique imaging/optics programs	High	Medium	High
Renewable energy capital of the US	Rapidly emerging concentration of alternative energy companies, including GM’s Fuel Cell Activities Research Center	Medium	Medium	Low
The place more scientists and engineers call home	Very high concentration of engineers and scientists per capita, highest number of patents per capita	Medium	Medium	Medium High
East coast progressive, Midwest friendly	History of progressiveness, home of Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass and other social and religious reformers, closer in proximity and friendliness to Cleveland and the Midwest than New York City and the East Coast	Medium	Medium High	Medium High
Higher education Mecca	18 Rochester area colleges and universities plus 4 seminaries, more than 62,000 students	Low	Medium High	Medium High
Music City	Home of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Rochester International Jazz Festival and two music schools including the world famous Eastman School of Music, numerous musical events every night of the week year-round	Low	Medium High	Medium
New York’s North Coast	On the southern shore of Lake Ontario	Medium	Medium	Medium
When you are ready to settle down	Great schools, attractive neighborhoods, affordable housing, an abundance of family activities	Low	Medium	High
Just perfect for families	Same as above	Low	High	High

So how should one interpret these results? First, only promises that are both unique and compelling should even be considered as finalists. While it would be nice to be high in believability too, sometimes a promise’s believability can be increased with the right proof points. Given this analysis, only “Gateway to the Finger Lakes” makes the cut. However, given the relatively high combined scores for all three criteria, the following should also be considered: “Small town feel, big city culture” and “Where everything is only 20 minutes away.”

While someone might be tempted to choose “Just perfect for families” because it is highly compelling and believable to current residents, it would miss the point that those qualities are not perceived to be unique to other options. Similarly, while “Imaging capital of the US” has both high uniqueness and believability, it should not be chosen because it is only somewhat compelling.

Among residents, these results paint the picture of a very livable medium sized city with a highly educated population, rich cultural offerings and a high quality of life. While not unique or even exciting, this is a compelling mix of attributes to many people.

This analysis should also be conducted for other key audiences such as businesses and tourists/visitors and their arbiters.  The ideal promise would be unique and compelling to the most important audience(s), while not having negative connotations among the other audiences.

This analysis can be applied to any type of brand and should be conducted using statistically projectable quantitative research.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Comments

[Take Flight]

Can you give an example of how a brand positioning or marketing mantra drives down to a brand promise - we often confuse them as one in the same.