The power of writing down your customer promise
Why should our customers buy from us?
The answer to this question is your customer promise — also known as your customer value proposition.
An effective customer promise will be a clear, concise statement that sums up how you make your customer’s life better — and how you do so in a way that’s different from your competitors.
Committing your customer promise to words is a powerful exercise. And not just because the resulting statement will inform all your sales and marketing, telling new customers why they should by from you and existing ones why they should stick with you.
Nailing your promise can also give you and your colleagues clarity about who you’re there to serve and how. That promise can be a stake in the ground for you and your team. One that says: we do this and not that (yes, your customer promise should tell people as much about what you don’t do for customers as what you do do).
Example: we recently articulated a customer promise for a client. We began by conducting multiple interviews with senior leaders and, as is always our way, immersing ourselves in verbatim customer feedback. The statement we landed on as a result of that work was clear, concise, compelling and jargon-free.
And here’s where it got interesting: when we presented that bold, unambiguous statement to the wider team, it uncovered disagreements (or at least misunderstandings) about who they were there to serve. The words prompted deep discussions about the precise moment the business wanted to be there in the life of their customer (and when they didn’t). Discussions that would not have happened, had they not committed their customer promise to words.
That’s the power of writing things down.
If you and your colleagues can’t immediately recite your own customer promise, now’s the time to commit it to words. Here are some thoughts on how to approach it.
Get inside the head of your target customer
Start by digging into who your target customer is and what motivates them at that very moment they’re willing to open their wallet and part with their cash.
A common starting point for thinking through that moment is the pains and gains model, pains being the things your customer struggles with, gains being the things they desire. Problems and pleasures, if you like.
Often, your customer’s pains and gains will be two sides of the same coin — in that your product or service will replace their pain with a gain. Does it save them time, worry or hassle? Does it make them smarter, richer or more attractive?
Those are the starting points for your customer promise. But they’re only the starting points. Next you need to…
Seriously. Get inside the head of your customer.
Getting inside the head of your target customer means shaking off how you see your product or service — and adopting your customer’s viewpoint. And with that, shaking off how you talk about what you do and reframing it in your customer’s language.
Take a customer promise like “a luxury hotel experience at an affordable price” or “custom beauty solutions for your unique skin type”. At first glance, either of these may seem compelling, if that’s what you think you offer.
But would a regular person ever utter sentences like these? In particular, those words experience and solutions are always more likely to come out of the mouth of a marketer than the mouth of the marketed to (cf dining experience, shopping experience, innovative solutions etc).
The lesson here? Talk to your customers about what they get from you — and write down what they say. If they tell you they love the “mahoosive rooms” or that your face cream is “lush”, that’s the vocab to use.
Take inspiration from your competitors
An essential step in crafting your customer promise is to look at all the promises your competitors are making.
And then go in a different direction.
You may think there’s safety in saying exactly what people are used to hearing from a business like yours. But the point about your customer promise is that it needs to tell people why they should choose you over and above all the other options that are available to them.
Here, for example, is the epilogue to our story above about the customer promise that prompted fierce debate about how our client wanted to show up for their customers. They stuck with our proposed wording and the team is now united around a single, specific customer promise. They’re even getting praise from industry insiders for “talking about this stuff in a way no one else is, making the promise an easy sell”.
The lesson? Be brave and commit to standing out, not blending in.
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