Summary

Under pressure, you see whether the brand promise works in practice or reads like a slogan. It exposes whether strategy genuinely shapes the experience. The move is to turn the promise into an operating standard that defines moments and measures. From there, decisions regain clarity and confidence.

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Our Perspective

What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.

Trust As Outcome

Trust doesn’t live in a deck; it’s produced by the gap between what you say and what a buyer feels in the moments that matter. When that gap widens, sales slow, service is stretched, and leaders start firefighting symptoms rather than fixing causes. The point is simple: a brand promise is an operating decision, not a slogan.

One data point makes the cost visible: Gartner notes that around 81% of customers avoid buying from brands they don’t trust—so the price of misalignment is paid up front, long before retention is at risk.

From Slogan To Standard

Treat the promise like a specification. Write down what it means in practice at each critical interaction—pre-sale, onboarding, and support—and define what “good” looks like in language teams can use when they’re under pressure.

• Translate the promise into explicit behaviours and service levels for those moments.
• Embed the standards where choices happen—scripts, templates, tooling prompts, checklists.
• Prove it with two visible customer commitments (e.g., response time, time-to-value) and track them weekly.

Operating The Promise

Trust compounds when governance, incentives, and measurement reinforce the same behaviours. Most organisations we work with find that decision quality rises when the promise is used to adjudicate trade-offs in real time, rather than as an after-the-fact rationale.

• Create a cross-functional cadence where the promise resolves conflicts—product scope, service design, pricing moves.
• Publish a simple scoreboard of the two commitments; celebrate proofs, not just targets hit.
• Align rewards to behaviours that deliver the promise, not simply to volume—renewal quality over raw bookings, for example.

The Value Of Consistency

Consistency reduces perceived risk, and reduced risk accelerates decisions. When delivery repeatedly confirms the promise, buyers need fewer assurances, fewer references, and fewer concessions. Over time, that consistency shows up in shorter cycles, steadier renewals, and pricing headroom that isn’t won through negotiation but earned through reliability.

There’s a customer side to this too: UserTesting reports that, on average, people are prepared to pay about 25% more to stay with a brand they trust—proof that dependable experience creates real pricing power.

What To Watch

Misalignment shows early if you know where to look. You’ll see pressure in the seams: sales using discounts to bridge doubt, onboarding times drifting, and support answering the same expectation gaps again and again. Culture follows—teams stop believing the story when they can’t reliably deliver it.

• Rising variance in time-to-value across customer segments.
• Review language that flags “not as expected” or “harder than promised.”
• More handoffs and exception paths in core journeys.

Make the promise operational and the experience becomes self-reinforcing; trust then acts as a quiet multiplier across brand, delivery, and growth.

Sources:

• Brand Strategies Focused on Dependability Score Highest on Customer Trust — Gartner
• New UserTesting Global Study Finds Brand Loyalty Stronger Than Ever—Even as Prices Rise — UserTesting

Further Resources

1. Aligning Brand and Strategy to Overcome Misalignment
2. Brand Architecture That Enables Post-M&A Growth
3. Rebalancing Brand: Moving Beyond Founder Dependence

Brand clarity often begins with the right questions — we’d be glad to explore them with your team. Start the conversation.

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