More and more we hear and read about corporations and their “brand promise.”  The promise is made to the customer, is a guiding principle for company employees, and in theory is reflected in the company’s approach to everything it does.  While a mission statement looks inward to what a company stands for, a brand promise is external. It defines what the customer can expect from the brand and the positive impact that brand will have on a customer’s life.

I believe the best brand promise any retailer can make is a guaranteed memorable customer experience.  Many retailers like to think they do this, but our own shopping experience tells us that isn’t the case.  It’s not easy to deliver that memorable experience, and you won’t do it unless you are specifically trying to do so.  The reason is that those who create these brand promises fail to realize that ultimately the promise is kept or broken by the frontline employee.  Much like a mission statement, it’s just words until the rubber meets the road.

For any retail brand promise to be kept, all frontline employees must understand the promises and the actions they must take to fulfill them.  If a retailer promises friendly and helpful employees, then the store staff must engage the customer in an upbeat and friendly manner.  Often the barrier to keeping these promises is put up by the very same executives who’ve created the promise.  Many retailers have an “easy returns” brand promise for their customers but at the same time penalize store managers for having too many returns.  When an internal policy, guideline, or metric is in conflict with a brand promise, the promise will inevitably be broken.

Some brand promises are assumed by the customer even if the retailer doesn’t state them.  Customers assume that independent retailers give better service but have higher prices.  Either may or may not be true. 

While any one of your brand promises can help you attract a new customer, breaking any of your promises can lose them.  Retailers probably lose more customers to a broken promise than they know.  Those Silent Majority customers I wrote about recently will leave without telling you.  This is why it is so important to measure how well you are executing your brand promise.  Many retailers know the results of the promise (sales) or how well they are keeping the various facets of the promise for a few customers (mystery shops), but without data directly from the customer or feedback from the frontline it’s tough to measure exactly how your promise is holding up.

Try this brand promise exercise.  Take a sheet of paper and draw three columns.  In the first column list the brand promises you’ve stated to your customer and the ones they are likely to assume.  In the middle column list the accompanying frontline actions that you’ve communicated to your employees and trained them to take.  In the third column, list the measurement, metric, or frontline feedback you use to measure how well you keep your promises

So let me ask, how’s your brand promise?

Read more of Doug’s writing on his website. 

Twitter is a Web-based “micro-blogging” service, a text messaging service where people exchange the same sort of short message you might send from your cell phone, but distributed to a set of friends, not just one friend at a time. Using Twitter you can send short updates to your “followers,” other users who have chosen to receive your messages.  And “short” is really short: messages can be no longer than 140 characters, but that is more than enough if your message is well-crafted.

To use Twitter for business, you need to have followers. Followers are the people who listen to your short messages (known as “tweets”). You can invite people directly, but there is another method to get followers that relies on listening to them first. This technique is based on the observation that people you follow will get an e-mail that gives them an option to follow you. Many of the people you follow will follow you back.

So an easy way to get started is to follow a lot of other people, but you want to follow people who are interested in what you have to offer. These people are very easy to discover: just look at who is following your competition.

From the page where you enter your tweets, you can search for other people by keywords. For an apparel boutique, you might try: “style,” “fashion,” “boutique,” “shoe,” and “clothing.” Look through the results page to find entries that are either (a) similar businesses to yours or (b) have themes that are complements to yours. For instance, if you are selling surf apparel, you would search for “surf” and “skateboard” to look for other surf apparel retailers and vendors as well as board shops, skate shops, and conversations about skating or surfing.

Once you have a list of hits, click on a user’s name to get that user’s main page. Then look in the right-hand column for “Followers.” Click on that to get the list of followers for that user. Read through the list to find people who are likely to be interested in what you are offering and click “Follow” next to those entries.

After you follow these users, the users will get an e-mail announcing you. If you have set your username, full name, and bio well, many of these users will decide to follow you.

Following a lot of related users has an additional value"you will show up among a lot of users’ followers, where people looking for tweets like yours will see you.

Next comes the hard part"you’ve made an implicit promise to these people to send them interesting tweets, so get to work. Twitter about things your followers will care about, and include short links back to your website (use tinyurl.com to make long urls shorter). And now you’ve made a connection to a new set of potential customers.