Is Your Brand Promise a Yawn?

Wondering which brand positions will guarantee you’ll just be one of the crowd?

1. Quality is job #1
2. The difference is our people
3. Your success is our success
4. Customer service is our pleasure
5. Great value for your dollar

(Or variations of the same)

These are probably the five most common “tagline” positions in the marketplace. And not one of them has any meaning to consumers.

Why?

They’re common, use bland language, make vague promises and are absolutely ordinary. In the end, they are simply the promises every business should make to their customers.

Shouldn’t we all provide quality products and services?
Don’t most businesses have well-meaning employees who care about the customers?
Isn’t the point of our business to help our customers be successful?
Doesn’t every business strive for good customer service?
And, shouldn’t we provide value for our compensation?

How does any of that make your business special? Or different?

So if they are meaningless, why would a business adopt one of these? They are businesses who:

Can’t figure out how they are different from their competitors
Aren’t different from their competitors
Aren’t willing to make the effort to figure out how they are different
Don’t care to be different from their competitors

Be honest with yourself. Are you clinging to one of these five “non-brands” and pretending that you’re actually communicating a meaningful difference?

If your answer was yes, then the most important question to ask is why?

James

haha those tag lines surely are over used but good post though

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Noobpreneur

Drew,

Good article - I've seen those 'obsolete' tags - Although I believe it's meaningful for the company, but it's no longer 'current'.

A 'serving you with care' tag will not entice your customer!

Drew McLellan

Chris,

Agreed. But the problem is...they used it as their brand for years.

I wasn't really picking on Ford. Many companies adopt a quality brand promise. The reality is...most consumers can't tell the difference between a very good and a superb product or service.

Quality is an ego brand position. Not focused on the consumer but focused on the business owner/team.

Drew

Nick,

Eliminating cliches and puns from our business would be wonderful. The problem is...clients love them.

I think it is a case, usually, of not knowing any better.

What do you think?

chris

Ford's "Quality is job 1" statment is the result of a TQM (total quality management) initiative. It's a necessary part of the initiative, in that it communicates the initiative to all employees at all levels of the organization. That it worked its way into Ford's marketing and advertising was inicidental to their quality program. In short, "Quality is job 1" is less a branding issue and more of a manufacturing and management issue.

Nicholas Burman

Great article! It's so true. Too many companies use these meaningless taglines.
On my blog I posted a list of things in advertising that need to go. I guess the only way to fix it is to make sure the advertising we create avoids the cliches!

Nick.
www.nburmandesign.com/blog

Jay,

My examples were really more to demonstrate the "core message" that most businesses gravitate to, tagline wise. Not that the words in that very order were taglines.

I agree with you, most people handle taglines incorrectly and end up wasting a very valuable resource. Can you think of an effective tagline that combines those elements (mission, vision, values) in a memorable and remarkable way?

Ed,

All five of the "brand positions/tagline" messages listed are so common that they've become meaningless and really they're just the basics. There's nothing spectacular there.

A brand should be memorable and remarkable. Which means it can't be more of the same old, same old!

Jay Ehret

Slogans are not necessarily reflections of brand promises. Your examples are not even really brand promises, the are slogans that a business thinks it needs to attract customers. And there's the big mistake.

You should not devise a slogan and/or brand promise based on what you think will bring customers in, or even because it sounds catchy. Your brand promise is really your values combined with mission and your vision.

Start with your values and you will end up with an effective, and not hollow, brand promise.

Ed Kohler

"Quality is job #1" is the only one that has anything I feel I could latch onto as a consumer among the slogans you mentioned. Perhaps that would teach people to expect the best in exchange for slightly higher prices? There has to be some form of trade-off.