Five Ways to Live Your Value & Brand Promise

Featured in Muncie Power Quarterly, Issue 1, 2015

1. Value provides true focus

Only our customers define value. However, not all customers may fit your company. Knowing who you are and what your real value proposition is should focus your entire organization on delivering on your brand promise.

2. Fund the promise

By now, you are most likely past your budgeting process, but it never hurts to look back and ask yourself if you are appropriately funding your brand promise. If not, you are more likely going to fail to deliver or, even worse, drift from your value proposition. Straying from your value proposition can be detrimental to your brand promise, leading to the acceptance of customers who seek only price reductions or the election of suppliers who operate on price alone. Suppliers such as these cannot deliver on supplying quality nor reliable goods and services.

3. Be choosy about with whom you align

Choose carefully who you align your brand with in the marketplace. If you don’t choose correctly, by default, your customers and/or suppliers can brand your company for you—and that is never good. 

4. Beware of philosophy drift

It’s all too easy to chase a big order and fast profits with a potential customer that will denigrate your company brand in the long haul. Stay true to your philosophy and your customers will stay true to you.

5. Bake it in

Constantly and consistently remind each other of what got your company where it is today and what you stand for. Bake it into every departmental document and every brand effort you make whether internal or external. Most importantly, live out your brand promise every day. Everyone is watching, and that is the best teacher of all.