Is Your Brand Promise a Yawn?

Drew McLellan Written by Drew McLellan
on June 20th, 2007 / 10 Comments / Print this

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?

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan gets branding and marketing and he desperately wants you to get it too.

So he tells stories, asks questions, and milks sacred cows. All to help clients discover their brand so they can create authentic love affairs with their customers.

Drew has not only survived 20 years in the advertising and marketing arena, he’s thrived in it. After working for several other agencies, including Young and Rubicam’s CMF&Z, Drew created McLellan Marketing Group in 1995.

Considered a national branding expert, Drew is a highly sought after speaker and has given about a zillion presentations at national conferences, key note addresses, training for his peers in the profession, college students and even his daughter’s eighth grade class.

Over the years, Drew has lent his expertise to clients like Nabisco, IAMS pet foods, Kraft Foods, Meredith Publishing, John Deere, Iowa Health System, Make-A-Wish, University of Central Florida, SkiDoo and a wide array of others.

When he’s not out preaching the good word of marketing & branding at work and on his blog Drew’s Marketing Minute, Drew spends time with his family and pondering why the Dodgers can’t seem to get back to the World Series.

Drew has a Master’s Degree from the University of Minnesota but alas, he cannot remember their fight song.

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10 Comments to “Is Your Brand Promise a Yawn?”

  • Ed Kohler
    June 21st, 2007
    3:01 am

    “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.

  • Jay Ehret
    June 22nd, 2007
    5:38 am

    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.

  • Drew McLellan
    June 22nd, 2007
    3:45 pm

    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!

    Drew

  • Drew McLellan
    June 22nd, 2007
    3:48 pm

    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?

    Drew

  • Nicholas Burman
    June 23rd, 2007
    1:11 pm

    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.
    http://www.nburmandesign.com/blog

  • chris
    June 24th, 2007
    1:15 pm

    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.

  • Drew McLellan
    June 26th, 2007
    4:01 pm

    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?

    Drew

  • Drew McLellan
    June 26th, 2007
    4:04 pm

    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

  • How Are Blogs And Brands Related? | Small Business Marketing & Branding
    July 2nd, 2007
    10:37 pm

    [...] we recently discussed, many companies adopt a superficial brand. It sounds good, it uses the right buzzwords and it helps them avoid the heavy lifting of real [...]

  • Noobpreneur
    May 17th, 2008
    10:11 am

    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!

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