Is it time you made a promise to your customers?

In the classic marketing book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, authors Al Ries and Jack Trout discuss how the challenge for marketers is to create a singular and favorable position in the minds of consumers for your product. One of the most effective ways I know to create this position is to make a promise to your customers—a promise that extols the single biggest benefit for your customers.

There are plenty of examples from successful brands:

• FedEx (Federal Express) promises their customers that their package will absolutely, positively arrive the next day.
• Walmart promises that you can buy good products at an inexpensive price.
• Bounty paper towels promises that it will pick up spills fast.
• Wisk will get your whole wash clean, including the ring around the collar.
• GEICO will save you 15% in 15 minutes.

I know these things because each brand decided to make a single, benefit-oriented promise to me and reiterate that promise over and over through every media channel in which I experienced the brand. It not only burned their message into my gray matter, but in some cases, it also became part of popular culture. And by promising just one thing, it makes it easy for me, as a consumer, to compartmentalize that brand—position them, if you will—in a world inundated with marketing messages and brands.

A promise can be an effective marketing tool. At The Duffy Agency, we develop creative briefs for each project. The brief is a roadmap of sorts that provides direction for our creative teams. One of the key questions we try to answer in the creative brief is this: what is the one promise we can make? (And just as important, what facts do we know that will back up this promise?) It's a simple enough question, but one that is very hard to answer.

Many of the brands we work with have many excellent features and benefits. Unfortunately, when you try to express all these attributes, it ends up muddling the message. Consumers would rather have a one-to-one relationship in their mind for your product. And if you give them too many choices, they end up remembering nothing.

Of course, you don't have to ignore all the other benefits. You can mention them as well, but the main driver for your communication should be built around this singular promise. There is an expression that a jack of all trades is a master of none. And consumers are looking for masters to solve problems.

So the next banner ad, direct mail piece, or email campaign you are going to produce, ask yourself this: what is the single biggest benefit my product or service offers my target customer? What is the one thing I can promise that my product or service will solve that is relevant to the target's need? Answer that question and you'll begin positioning your brand in the mind of your target in a way that will be nearly impossible to eradicate.

Kevin Duffy is the Creative Director for The Duffy Agency's Boston office.