The Viennese love their Sacher Torte. We all love to hate Ryanair. And some of us loathe BP. What do chocolate cake, cheap flights and oil have in common? All three cases prove that brands are, in part, a set of expectations.
We expect Sacher Torte to be rich and sweet, based on what we’ve heard, read and experienced. We expect Ryanair to treat us like cattle – both through experience and because the company’s CEO quite literally promises this in his interviews. And we now expect BP to be a terribly run company that’s bad for the environment because of the streak of accidents it has been involved in.
Brands make a promise to us and then act on the promise in one way or another. The promise, of course, is the easy part. In most cases, we’ve come to pay little attention to the superlative-laden ads and stunts that companies run to convince us of one ‘truth’ or another.
But talk is cheap.
It’s infinitely harder to actually deliver. Four Seasons promises unparalleled luxury and seems to get it right more often than not. It manages to pleasantly surprise us within a reassuring framework of consistent service levels. And reliable delivery against the promise they make is presumably why they have been able to build a loyal following amongst travellers.
BP on the other hand promised one thing (‘beyond petroleum’) and delivered another – a focus on oil and gas paired with a dismal health & safety record. What that’s done for them is abundantly clear. Try as they might, we can’t trust a company that doesn’t deliver what they promise, and whose record lets us expect that the worst is yet to come. Famously, “you can’t talk your way out of something you’ve behaved your way into”.
And so in both cases it can be said that the brand is a set of expectations that a brand has created in our minds. We are more ready to forgive Four Seasons’ little errors because the overall impression is so positive. And poor BP can’t seem to do anything right since everything they do is now seen through a lens of cynicism and doubt.
So only those brands whose promise is relevant and whose delivery is consistently great succeed. Some are so successful that they end up creating expectations for the entire industry. Before Apple, IT companies could be impersonal and jargony. Before Vueling, budget airlines were drab and no fun. And before Amazon, buying a book meant being limited to what your local store had in stock. All three are very clear about what they promise and therefore manage to deliver, more or less always, exactly that.
