Is Your Professional Services Brand Promise a Lie?

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Is your firm is living a lie? More specifically, is your firm truly delivering on your brand promise?

Your brand promise is what you promise your potential clients you will do. It is either explicit ("your satisfaction is our highest priority") or implied by everything you do and say, from your tagline to the behavior of your business development team.

Now there are several common ways that professional services firms lie about their brand promise. The most common lie comes in the form of overpromising. Unfullfilled promises are all over professional services websites. Observe all the technical expertise, attentive service and the intense passion for solving clients problems. We are fortunate to be in an industry where everyone is above average! The unfortunate result of this flood of superlatives is that it all becomes unbelievable. Sad but true.

A close cousin of the over-promise is the muddled promise. It's as if your firm mumbles as it makes its promise to potential clients. If a client can't understand what you are saying, they will build their own set of expectations independent of your interest in making good on them. You may be struggling to deliver on a promise of technical excellence while they are expecting speed. These situations rarely end well.

The third way that firms fail to deliver on their brand promise may seem a bit counterintuitive. Many firms don't recognize it's happening. The culprit it the under-promise. Let me give you an example. We were recently consulting with a well-established firm that had an excellent reputation for providing high-level service. As a result, they received a wealth of referrals. Yet they were failing to sign many of these hiqh-quality referrals.

By any reasonable standard they should have won most of this business. Why weren't they? At least part of the answer is that their brand promise, as conveyed in their website and marketing materials, fell far short of what they were actually capable of delivering. Their website looked-out-of-date and amateurish. They were easy to eliminate from consideration before they had a chance to get face to face. They were sabotaging themselves.

The moral of the story is clear. Choose how you want to compete, make a clear and easy-to-understand brand promise. Then make darn sure you deliver on it.

To learn more about branding in a professional services firm check out the Rebranding Kit below.