Crystal Clear Communications Blog

Marketers make a lot of marketing promises to clients and prospects: great service, amazing value, innovation. It’s our job. Delivering on these promises builds trust, enhances reputation, and ensures customer satisfaction – all essential for long-term success.

When companies don’t deliver on their marketing promises, they risk a hit to their reputation, loss of customers, and the inability to gain new clients due to word of mouth. It takes only one unhappy customer to create a crisis.

You may remember that United Airlines stopped its “Fly the Friendly Skies” campaign after a leaked video of a passenger being dragged off an overbooked flight.

The best way to avoid fallout is of course by making only the marketing promises your company can, and will, keep. You can do that by knowing your company and your customers well. Here are three tips to help you create valid marketing promises:

• Start with your company values: If it’s been a while since you reviewed your company values, that’s a good place to start. Most organizations publish and try to live up to their values. Therefore, marketing promises that align with those values are usually a good bet. (If your organization isn’t living up to its values, you have larger problems than marketing.)
• Review customer and employee feedback: Gather as much customer and employee feedback as you can. Review the feedback for common themes – both positive and negative – as you may learn new things about how your organization is perceived. Use this feedback to inform your marketing promises and content.
• Conduct win-loss interviews: I strongly encourage every organization to conduct win-loss interviews. Yes, it takes budget, because you need to use a third party that your target audience trusts. But what you can learn from these interviews is extremely valuable. Clients and prospects will tell a third party their thoughts about you and your competitors that they won’t tell you directly. You can find out where you are weak AND where your competitors are weak, and then use that information to make believable marketing promises and content.

Taking the time to ensure your company will make good on your marketing promises is worth it to protect your brand, your reputation and your revenue.

If you’re in a situation where you’ve already broken marketing promises, your company needs to act fast. Here are some tips from my business partner, George Stenitzer, on how content marketing can help rebuild customer trust.

Have questions about marketing and communications? Get answers weekly or email me at ariana@crystalclearcomms.com.