The brand promise is the most important part of a brand’s design. A brand must promise a relevant, compelling and differentiated benefit to the target customer. (People often confuse benefits with attributes and features. The brand must promise a benefit, not an attribute or feature.) The benefit may be functional, emotional, experiential or self-expressive (Who am I? What do I value? What are my convictions? With whom do I associate? To what do I aspire?). Non-functional benefits are the most desirable, however, as they appeal to people on a visceral level and are the least vulnerable to competitive copying.
The benefit must focus on points of difference, not points of parity. The ideal benefit to claim has the following three qualities: (1) it is extremely important to the target consumer, (2) your organization is uniquely suited to delivering it and (3) competitors are not currently addressing it (nor is it easy for them to address it in the future).
In their book, Creating Brand Loyalty: The Management of Power Positioning and Really Great Advertising, Richard D. Czerniawski & Michael W. Maloney indicate that the most powerful benefits tap into people’s deeply held beliefs, exploit your competitors’ vulnerabilities or overcome previous concerns people had about your brand, its product/service category or its usage. From our experience, the most powerful benefits give people hope that they can overcome or transcend their anxieties, fears, problems or concerns.
At The Blake Project, we usually follow these steps to identify the optimal brand benefit:
• Review of previous product and brand research
• Qualitative research (focus groups, one-one interviews, etc.) to better understand the target customer’s attitudes, values, needs, desires, fears and concerns, especially as they relate to your brand’s product/service category
o Within this research step, we usually develop short benefit statements and run them by the target customer iteratively to get a feeling for which are the most compelling
• Compiling a list of 20-40 possible benefits
• Research that quantifies the importance of each of the possible benefits to your target customer together with that customer’s perceptions of how your brand and each of its competitors deliver against those benefits (to identify the most important benefits which your brand could “own”)
Do you know the optimal benefits which your brand could own?
The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education
