This series revisits the basics of branding and marketing by answering questions marketers, entrepreneurs and small business owners face when growing their business. I hope this series provides you with knowledge to think smarter and a nudge to make stuff happen.
How can Business Operations Support the Brand Promise?
To me, a “brand promise” is what customers expect to experience with a business. Anytime a business delivers something different, it breaks its “brand promise” with customers.
Whole Foods, for example, promises its customers the grocery store will not sell foods with artificial additives, sweeteners, colorings, and preservatives. Suppose a Whole Foods store decides to sell Coca-Cola. That action would break the “brand promise” of Whole Foods and would create a DISCONNECT between what a customer expects and what a company delivers.
Business operations can best support its brand promise by making sure disconnects do not happen.
Every Christmas, Starbucks sells a Cranberry Bliss Bar as a limited time offering. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Starbucks ran print ads, aired radio spots, and used direct mail to drive even more traffic into its stores during the Holidays. We used to feature Cranberry Bliss Bars in many of these ads.
To help ensure a disconnect didn’t happen when a customer visited a Starbucks during this time, the Marketing Dept. kept the Operations Team informed about the need to always have Cranberry Bliss Bars in stock and featured prominently in the pastry case.
The last thing we wanted was a customer coming into Starbucks and expecting a Cranberry Bliss Bar with their Peppermint Latte only to find out the store was sold out of Bliss Bars.
Especially for retail businesses, it is the operations team’s responsibility to deliver upon the experiences customers expect. If the operations team fails to deliver on these experiences, a DISCONNECT happens.
And, it is the marketing team’s responsibility to deliver products and programs in ways customers expect. When they don’t do that, a DISCONNECT happens.
Disconnects are promise breakers in the retail business.
The fewer disconnects a business has, the more success it will have.
REVISITING THE BASICS | archive
