Tag Archives: brand promise

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Back to Basics: Best Bets for a Robust Year End

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When B2B marketing decision-makers were asked to name their most effective B2B marketing best practices, it was discovered that those who followed best practices recommended by their industry peers produced revenue and profit results for their organizations that showcased them and the companies for whom they work as leaders. By contrast, B2B marketers who did not consistently adhere to those highly recommended best practices finished the study period as laggards, who did not achieve desirable revenue and profit targets. B2B marketers who apparently had little faith in the power of those highly recommended marketing best practices produced lackluster revenue and profit results for their companies. B2B marketers whose organizations emerged as revenue and profit leaders not only produced higher revenue and profit growth but also achieved better client retention and growth of the company’s client roster.

Forrester, the global research and advisory company headquartered next door to Boston in Cambridge, MA, revealed in a 2025 marketing survey a sharp divide between B2B leaders and laggards based on responses from 1,060 marketing decision-makers. Forrester researchers compared a cohort of leading marketers, who consistently applied recommended marketing best practices, which ranged from cross-functional in-house collaborations to client-based personalized marketing strategies. Forrester researchers also identified a cohort of lagging marketers, who fell short where leading marketers and their companies excelled. The business outcomes were clear—leading marketers, who closely followed recognized marketing best practices, rewarded their organizations with significantly stronger revenue and profit metrics, plus a robust client list that was augmented by improved client retention.

As marketers and all business leaders and owners struggle to adapt to seismic changes that have rocked the global economy for 20+ years, and especially since the 2020-2022 pandemic era, the necessity of future-proofing their business entities has become obvious. The Forrester survey indicates that applying well-known marketing best practices requires is an essential component of a resilient business entity. Additional marketing best practices that nurture high-growth companies include the use of AI-powered tech solutions that among other key functions can be used to design personalized marketing campaigns and tactics and also facilitate alignment between marketing, sales and operations.

Maximize marketing

Marketing teams will do well to reacquaint themselves with marketing fundamentals to navigate this era of lengthened B2B sales cycles, economic instability marked by cautious spending habits, lay-offs at leading multinationals (e.g. Amazon and Starbucks) and rising B2B buyer expectations. Develop marketing campaigns that emphasize the unique sales proposition of your service or product. Provide opportunities for buyer engagement that answer questions, educate, build community and inspire brand loyalty. Furthermore, synchronize strategic and operational alignment with your sales and marketing activities—not an easy task since prospects are quite comfortable conducting digital research of your services or products (and also your competitors’) before seeking info from your team. The change in power dynamics has caused a disruption in the usual alignment between marketing and sales functions—and for 61% of B2B prospects, that’s how they like it, according to a 2024 survey conducted by Gartner Research.

  • Develop a buyer’s journey that provides appealing responses to the typical prospect’s initial curiosity and questions about your products and services by building a marketing/ sales funnel that anticipates needs. The number of touchpoints in a B2B buyer’s journey that results in a sale varies according to industry; as you build your company’s sales/marketing funnel, information generated by AI-powered client research is your best way to learn the information that prospects desire most, end-to-end.
  • Use AI-powered customer relations management to identify client groups that have a preference for certain of your services and/or products and use the intel to devise marketing campaigns and strategies to purposed to increase your market share.
  • Keep it simple by creating marketing messages that focus on user outcomes; include AI-identified personalization data at every client touchpoint to enhance the customer experience and encourage purchases.

Productivity over market expansion

Discovering a niche market that’s worth a gamble—that is, worth the resources you’d invest to develop it—is no doubt high on the wish-list of nearly all Freelance consultants and business owners. However, Forrester survey marketing leaders did not necessarily think the “grass is greener” and chose not to chase what might be a mirage.

Marketing leaders kept their feet firmly planted on the ground and instead maximized resources and advantages already in hand to deliver their revenue and profit targets. A big plus was that leaders worked for companies that invested in AI-powered tools and applied that resource to strategies they could expect to maximize productivity and drive business growth. Marketing leaders incorporated client insights, never lost sight of brand promises and used those benchmarks to strengthen their marketing messages. Those messages described and emphasized product and service solution outcomes, and went beyond merely listing product or service features, to help prospects envision precisely how the products or services would achieve important objectives (and make purchasing committee members look good).

This strategy can be depended on to encourage buyer engagement and trust, which boosts the likelihood of a purchase and, post-purchase, promotes client retention that grows revenue, profit and client lists. In fact, Forrester data showed that revenue generated by leading companies consisted mostly of existing, rather than new, clients. Market penetration means how well your product or service sells; increasing sales within the existing marketplace is much easier for Freelancers and small business owners than either creating new services or products or entering new markets.

  • Agile business strategies are a competitive advantage that help you adapt to changing business circumstances and maintain, or even grow, your client base, revenue and profit
  • Accurately identify your strongest competitors to learn how to more advantageously position your service or product in the marketplace—confirm your best customers and also refine your messages to obtain more selling opportunities and close gaps that inhibit sales
  • Muti-channel marketing optimizes communication with prospects. Create a presence on platforms that clients and prospects visit and trust to maximize engagement activities, broadcast marketing messages, build brand loyalty and create more purchasing opportunities
  • Collect and utilize first-party data to enhance personalization, engagement, loyalty and sales

AI-powered tech tools to enhance efficiency and outcomes

Employing AI-powered marketing automation can provide numerous operational efficiencies that enable deep-dive research that supports insightful data-driven decision-making that delivers the results you need. AI-powered software is the ticket to obtaining client insights that are timely and trustworthy.

  • AI-powered predictive analysis gives reliable feedback re: client behavior, helping you to devise personalized and effective marketing strategies and campaigns
  • Marketing campaign personalization is maximized and might include, e.g., dynamic email marketing that auto-adjusts in response to real-time client engagement metrics
  • Client segmentation supported by AI marketing allows you to consider an array of client characteristics—demographics, purchase history, industry, or content preferences, for example—to better understand purchase patterns and motivations
  • Chatbots, virtual assistants and/or autonomous AI agents that manage end-to-end client interactions, including problem resolution, order processing and appointment scheduling, can be made available to ensure that your company reliably provides 24/7 customer service that enhances the customer experience and boosts your brand reputation
  • Integrate AI marketing automation with customer relations management to synchronize marketing, sales and customer service functions

Maintain a client-centric focus

You’ve heard this before and apologies for repeating myself! It’s just that basic marketing best practices have demonstrated conclusively that they reliably produce the results B2B marketers need. The vast majority of best practices marketing strategies and tactics, while reconfigured to resonate with current technology and client priorities, concerns and habits, have not been made obsolete. Inbound marketing, outbound marketing, content marketing, guerilla marketing and social media marketing remain effective today, although integrating them with current advanced technology and maintaining a focus that keeps client goals, priorities and pain points at top of mind will yield the best outcomes.

  • Invite client feedback by inviting or initiating personal conversations, consistent and relevant social media posts created to encourage replies and/or creating a short survey that’s sent to clients you’ve worked with over the past four or five years, to learn what they perceive as your company’s strengths and weaknesses. It is instructive to obtain insight into how client needs and expectations evolve over time, so that you can use the info to improve your product-market fit, or also hear their thoughts on what competitors offer, or get the heads-up on shifting concerns or priorities
  • Identify your typical prospect’s most important goals, business drivers and pain points that trigger a need for your category of business solutions
  • Develop a client buyer persona, a profile that represents your ideal buyer. If you have more than one significant target client group, you are encouraged to develop a buyer persona for each. A detailed buyer persona helps you to objectively envision how to personalize your strategies and campaigns by developing timely, relevant and engaging content for each client segment.
  • Provide excellent end-to-end customer service, from onboading to after-sale support

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Omar/Salaam Times. Afghan women weave a carpet in Injil District, Herat Province, Afghanistan on September 28, 2022.

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Brand Building: Deliver the Promise

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Can we agree that data driven decisions produce the most favorable outcomes? The mega database of customer info compiled by the World Advertising Research Centre of New York City, USA and London, UK has since 1985 provided powerful information to business leaders and enabled them to develop marketing strategies and campaigns that attract the attention prospective customers and persuade them to try a product or service or persuade existing customers to become frequent users, meaning repeat customers, of a product or service. WARC data points to a product’s brand promise as the definitive ingredient of successful marketing and brand-building campaigns. The right brand promise, one that target customers perceive as memorable, valuable and deliverable, has the power to influence the purchasing behavior of your target customers and convert them to buyers. WARC data also indicates that a well-crafted brand promise not only translates into purchases and sales revenue, but also provides a blueprint that can be used to devise successful marketing strategies and campaigns.

In other words, the key to successful brand-building is a clear and specific brand promise that target customers feel can be fulfilled. Such a brand promise has been shown to result in marketing campaigns that positively impact sales revenue and also help to shape effective marketing strategies and campaigns.

Commit to the brand promise

WARC research shows that brand promises that target customers trust and believe will be delivered result in sales of the product or service. Roger L. Martin, a former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (Canada) and author of A New Way to Think (2022); Jann Martin Schwartz, founder and Senior Global Director at the LinkedIn B2B Institute and Mimi Turner, head of Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America operations at the LinkedIn B2B Institute teamed up to more closely examine the question of effective marketing—how can business owners and leaders make it happen?

Martin, Turner and Schwartz sought to understand the active ingredients, if you will, of a marketing campaign—what makes it successful? The team recognized the potential appeal of the brand promise and they began by classifying WARC marketing campaign data according to whether or not a verifiable brand promise was made to customers. They found that of 2,021 campaigns analyzed, 40% (808) included an obvious brand promise and 60% (1,213) did not.

The first noteworthy finding of their research was campaigns that included a verified brand promise were more persuasive than campaigns with no brand promise in nearly every instance. In measures of brand perception, brand preference and purchase intent, 56% of campaigns offering a brand promise reported improvement. Market penetration increased in 45% of brand promise campaigns and market share increased in 27% of brand promise campaigns. The only metric in which a brand promise did not triumph was in generating social media buzz, where 55% of successful marketing campaigns omitted a brand promise.

Anatomy of a brand promise

As noted above, Turner, Schwartz and Martin started out by confirming the presence of a brand promise the the marketing campaigns; next, they categorized the type of brand promise made in campaigns where one was present. Most (89%) brand promises fit their definition of one or more of the following categories:

  • Emotional.

The researchers were surprised that a feel-good brand promise was the most popular category, with 35% assigned to this type. An emotional brand promise communicates the good feelings that will be experienced by customers who buy and use the product or service. A highly successful example of an emotional brand promise is the famous De Beers “A diamond is forever” marketing campaign brand promise that since 1947 has promised that the endurance of a diamond confirms the permanency and satisfaction of the marriage.

  • Functional

In 32% of the research sample, the brand promise stressed the reliability and functionality of the product or service. The FedEx “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight” campaign brand promise of 1978 was so powerful that it resulted in the creation of a new verb—to FedEx. The campaign’s brand promise can also be said to convey an emotional brand promise as well: customers don’t have to worry, because it’s FedEx.

  • Enjoyable to buy

Some companies (22%) took the unusual stance of portraying the enjoyment customers will experience as they shop for and buy a product or service. A good example an enjoyment-based brand promise is provided by the paint maker Sherwin-Williams; the company won the 2022 B2B Grand Prix at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival for its campaign based on an artificial intelligence tool that allows customers to create and choose a paint color by using voice to describe it (“a turquoise like the sea in the Maldives,” for example). Designers and architects swooned and prospective customers were convinced.

After the research team categorized the types of brand promises companies tend to make, they examined factors that make a brand promise strongly appealing to customers. Again, three features dominated successful campaigns:

  • Memorable

Surprisingly, making it known that a company is not the top seller in the marketplace can be highly persuasive. “We’re Avis and we try harder” was the slogan of the second-largest car rental company (after Hertz).  Within a year of its launch, Avis went from losing $3.2 million a year to earning $1.2 million a year. Advertising executives called the campaign the most brilliant of the 20th century.

  • Valuable

Customers must want what the brand promise offers, especially when the promise is communicated and perceived as an upgrade from circumstances that are perceived as unsatisfactory or lackluster. Prospective customers must feel that the value is relevant.

Deliverable

A defining characteristic of a brand promise is that it represents a guarantee; the customer must be able to recognize that the brand promise can be fulfilled and the benefits from its fulfillment will meet expectations. For that reason, making a brand promise is a risk. The research team’s assumption was that brand promises made campaigns were generally fulfilled, based on the success of the marketing campaigns studied.

Brand promise becomes strategy

The insight that effective brand building is anchored in a promise to the customer can do more for a company than just help it invest wisely in marketing. The promise can serve as the guiding principle of the marketing strategy, able to inform all promotional activities. A well-crafted and communicated brand promise is your North Star; creating and executing a brand promise is, the foundation of a strategy. From that brand promise/ strategy, you can understand how the company will beat its competitors, the value that customers see in your products and services, understand how the company position itself in the marketplace.

Below, Martin, Schwartz and Turner leave you with a five-step template that your company can use—a go-to-market brand promise development guide that also functions as the foundation of your marketing strategy. Furthermore, the study provides guidance about resources the company should dedicate to the various aspects of brand building, including which information sheds the most light on customer preferences, how to ensure that the most highly preferred aspects of the brand promise are delivered and how to effectively and efficiently communicating your brand promise.

  1. Step One is to understand customers well enough to know what constitutes memorability and value for them.

2. That understanding leads to Step Two, the development of a brand promise, expressed in a simple but compelling and memorable statement.

 3. In Step Three, your company publicly commits to the brand promise by launching the marketing campaign.

4. In Step Four, your company must communicate the brand promise to the target audience: If it isn’t received by way of the right channels, it can’t be effective.

5. Finally, in Step Five your company must fulfill the brand promise, or the promise will be largely worthless.

This cycle provides guidance about the resources the company must dedicate to the various aspects of brand building. How much should it dedicate to understanding customers? How much to designing and issuing a brand promise? How much to broadcasting and communicating it? And how much to ensuring that the key aspects of the brand promise are delivered? As the company repeats the cycle, it learns more about its strategic challenges and how to account for customer and competitor shifts.

The ultimate goal of a marketing campaign should be to go through the brand promise cycle often enough that your customers stop wondering whether you’ll make good on your promises. Once they assume that you will, they purchase out of habit rather than choice.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Photographed by James D. Love April 2021. William Hunn’s proposal to Brittney Miller included a helicopter ride over their home city of Atlanta, GA and Ms. Miller choosing one of the five engagement rings presented to her when she accepted his offer of marriage.