Are you Consistently Communicating Your Brand Promise? In Blackboard Fridays Episode 27, Jacob talks about Brand Promise. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.

Have you ever taken one of your up-and-coming team members to a function, and then gasped in horror when they’ve tried to answer the ‘What do you do?’ question?!

Or maybe you even get stuck on this yourself – finding the fine line between being specific but boring and being exciting (‘we stimulate synergies for revolutionary business models) but ridiculously vague.

There’s no benefit in having a single, scripted elevator pitch or positioning statement – how you describe your business at a family barbecue needs to be different to how you introduce yourself on stage. But you want consistency – to make your life easier, and to ensure that every member of your team is describing what you do and who you do it for in the same manner.

This week’s Blackboard Fridays video walks through the super-simple (and therefore effective) Brand Promise framework we use with our business coaching clients.

So whether you’re driving limousines, coaching entrepreneurs, or (ahem) stimulating synergies, this one is relevant for you.

Feel good about forwarding it along as well.

Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?

“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.” Back independent since 2019.

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.

At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.

You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.

That’s me.

Learn more here. Or Let’s chat.

Transcript

Good day. Jacob here again. I got a question off the back of last week’s Blackboard Friday’s video, and I’d encourage you to hit reply in those emails every week. Shoot your questions through to me I read them on I love hearing from you.

This is a question about a term that I use—brand promise and what exactly I meant by that. So, I thought this week we’d go through the simple framework that I use to help a client one, draft what their brand promise is and two, get all their team members explaining their business in the same way.

So, what is a brand promise?

You’ve probably heard this call several different things—it’s your elevator pitch, your positioning statement, your unique selling proposition. We like to use the term brand promise because it links this conversation to two key elements which is your bigger overall brand strategy (what you’re famous for and what you’re known for) and the promise that you make your customers at every step through the customer journey. This is kind of a connection between the two of them. Between your brand and your customers.

We break it down into these five simple questions. You may want to personalize these, or you may want to tailor them. Create your own unique brand promise structure and that’s perfectly fine.

In fact, I’d encourage you to do this, but this is a simple way to start, and it may well be sufficient. The first question: what is it you do? So, this here is the answer. We do ‘what’ and you’d be surprised how many businesses struggle to answer that question directly.

I ask this is at an event a couple of months ago. I picked on somebody in the audience as I am wanting to do and I said, ‘What is it that you do, what’s your business?’, and he said, ‘We give Brides an excellent experience.’ I thought it was great and that sounded nice and that’s helpful but ‘what is it you do?’. He said, ‘Well you know we set clear expectations with Brides on their wedding day, and we make sure we make them, so they’ve got no stress.’

That was fantastic and that sounded helpful but what is it that they do? This went back and forth, three or four more times, until he finally acknowledged that he was a limousine business.

So, all those other elements were true, that was a big part of his brand it was the value that he delivered his clients was that he would be there on the biggest day of their life, but he needed to make sure he told them what they did because he could well have been a florist, an event manager, or a caterer. None of that came through until he explained we rent limousines for brides.

Keep this element simple because we can build on it as we go through. So the next question is who is your ideal client or who are you doing this for? So, in his case, it was for Brides or for couples on their wedding day but he specifically knew that brides were largely the decision-makers so that was who his client was.

Question three, what is it about those clients that make them want to use your service? What’s the pain that they’re experiencing that you can alleviate? So, in his case we drive limousines for brides who want to know that nothing is going to go wrong on the most important day of their life.

That’s broad that’s most brides and that’s okay it speaks to a very common pain that they’re experiencing, and this is something that needs to come through and your brand promise. It’s not actually about you, it’s about your clients.

Question four is a little bit optional. It’s important for you and your team to understand what it is you don’t do because often it’s very tempting to say that we can do anything for anybody, articulating the things that you don’t do helps focus your brand promise and it’s that focus that create to cut through.

The last question is where you can start to have a little bit of fun. What is it about your process, your methodology, your business that makes it special? So, for our limousine driver, we drive limousines for brides who want to make sure that nothing goes wrong on the most important day of their life. Our process ensures that they are fully looked after and never have to worry about where the car is and where they’re going to next. That’s straightforward.

I’ll give you another example for me and my business. We provide business coaching mentoring and advisory services for entrepreneurs of active growth businesses who can see the growth that they’ve got in front of them but just feel a little bit stuck or uncertain. We don’t have all the answers or do everything; in fact, businessDEPOT have a whole collective of specialists and I refer more people to our collective that I take on as clients.

I’m very clear on my limitations around building that strategy and I know that our process our methodology ensures that our clients fill the gap from inspiration to execution which means that they can execute their bright ideas faster, more confidently, and with the full support of their team. What are the answers for your questions?

If you asked your team to answer those questions, would they come up with the same answers? And when each member of your team goes and talks to the market, to potential clients, potential referral sources, are they explaining this consistently or are they all over the shop with a whole lot of different things that you do and do well? Consistency in your brand promise is how you get outcomes from your brand promise.

Next Steps

Want to learn more about how this can apply to your business? It costs nothing to chat:

• Email me jacob@jacobaldridge.com (I read them all)
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