Find the brand promise your business can afford to keep

A brand promise is also a cost commitment. Use this five-part test to check whether yours survives peak demand, failure costs, evidence rules and competitors.

The positioning workshop ends with a strong line on the whiteboard. Then the finance director asks a simple question: what does it cost us to keep that promise on our worst day?

Most positioning work never meets that question. It should, because a promise customers believe is also a cost commitment your operations must fund, staff and defend.

A promise is a liability as well as an asset

A brand promise sets an expectation. Each expectation creates obligations: response times, stock levels, refund rules, staffing, product quality, legal substantiation.

When the obligations are affordable, the promise compounds. Customers experience it repeatedly and believe it more. When they are not, the company eventually breaks the promise at the moment it matters most, and the advertising becomes evidence against the brand.

The useful question for a CMO is therefore not “what do customers want to hear?” It is “which promise can we keep, profitably, at the extremes of our operation?”

Start from value customers actually weigh

Bain’s research, published in Harvard Business Review in September 2016, identified 30 “elements of value” grouped into functional, emotional, life-changing and social impact needs.

The point that matters here is ordering. Bain’s summary of the research notes that a company must provide at least some of the functional elements a category requires before it can deliver higher-order ones.

The same research found that perceived quality affected customer loyalty more than any other element, and that no other element could make up for a significant shortfall on it.

Put simply: an emotional promise built on a broken functional promise is not positioning. It is a mismatch customers will notice.

When the promise meets a bad week

The cost of a promise appears under stress, not in the planning cycle.

Consider the US Department of Transportation’s December 2023 action against Southwest Airlines. The department said that operational failures over the 2022 holiday period cancelled 16,900 flights and stranded more than two million passengers.

The consent order found failures in prompt refunds, timely flight-status notifications and adequate customer service assistance. It assessed a $140 million civil penalty, much of it directed toward a compensation system for future passengers.

The marketing lesson is not about airline scheduling. It is that customer experience promises are tested during disruption, and the bill for a broken promise can include refunds, compensation, regulatory penalties and lost trust at the same time.

Evidence is part of the cost

There is a regulatory dimension too. The UK advertising rulebook, the CAP Code, requires marketers to hold documentary evidence for objective claims before publication (rule 3.7). It also prohibits exaggerating a product’s capability or performance (rule 3.11).

Other jurisdictions have their own rules, so check with counsel. The managerial principle travels well: if you cannot prove a claim today, you cannot afford to make it today.

A five-part affordability test

Before approving a promise, run it through five questions. They work for a whole brand or for a single campaign claim.

1. What exactly are we promising?

Write the promise as the customer would repeat it, not as the agency wrote it. “Same-day response” is testable. “Effortless support” is not, until you define what effort means.

2. Who owns the delivery?

Name the operational owner for every part of the promise. If no one in operations, product or service has accepted the obligation, marketing is making a promise on someone else’s behalf.

3. What does it cost at the peak?

Model the promise in your busiest week, during a supply shock, or when your largest client escalates. Averages hide the moments when promises break.

4. What happens when it fails?

List the consequences: refunds, credits, penalties, contract clauses, complaint volumes, review sentiment, sales objections. A promise with a modest daily cost can carry a large failure cost.

5. Can a competitor match it cheaply?

If a rival can copy the promise without changing its cost structure, it will not stay distinctive. The strongest promises rest on something that is hard to replicate, such as a process, a network, data or a set of deliberate trade-offs.

An illustrative example

Hypothetical, with stated assumptions: an IT support firm considers promising “an engineer responds within 15 minutes, 24 hours a day.”

Its current median response is 40 minutes and it has overnight cover from two engineers. Meeting the promise at its historical peak volume might need five engineers overnight. The marketing team now has a concrete question for the board: is the additional staffing cost justified by higher win rates, prices or retention?

That is a better conversation than debating the slogan. It may produce a narrower but more credible promise, such as a 15-minute response for critical incidents only, which the firm can keep and prove.

Narrow promises often travel further

The instinct in positioning is to add. More benefits, more audiences, more reassurance. The affordability test usually pushes the other way.

A narrow promise that is kept every time builds evidence: reviews, case studies, renewal rates and sales references. A broad promise that is kept most of the time produces exceptions, and exceptions are what customers remember and repeat.

Your job is not to find the most attractive promise. It is to find the most attractive promise your business can keep at its worst, and then make sure everyone knows how it is kept.