A clear ‘promise to the customer’ gives campaigns a competitive edge

A Promise to the Customer is more likely to drive brand health, market share, and long-term sales, according to new research from WARC and LinkedIn’s B2B Institute.

Making a Promise to the Customer: How to give campaigns a competitive edge, a white paper published by WARC and The B2B Institute, LinkedIn’s marketing think tank, says brands can create more effective marketing by placing a clear promise to the customer at the heart of their strategy.

Why it matters

A Promise to the Customer (PTTC) is a proxy mental model that allows marketers to deploy familiar marketing frameworks in a way that is much more easily understood by the C-suite, other functions within their organisation, and customers themselves. PTTC puts accountability to the customer at its core and delivers against the basic pillars of marketing: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

Takeaways 

• When campaigns are grounded in an explicit Promise to the Customer – a memorable, valuable and deliverable promise – they are as much as 48% more likely to report brand health improvements than those that don’t. 

• The impact was consistent regardless of budget, duration, or number of channels used (the three drivers for measuring a campaign’s Creative Commitment). PTTC can therefore offer a competitive advantage to smaller or scale-up brands, or be a useful approach for marketing departments under budget pressure.

• PTTC campaigns deliver a commercial advantage – they are 60% more likely to report increased market share, and 17% more likely to report increased market penetration than non-PTTC campaigns.

• To assess the depth of commercial impact, PTTC campaigns were analysed against the Creative Effectiveness Ladder. At all but the lowest rung, PTTC campaigns over-indexed against their non-PTTC counterparts. Additionally, PTTC campaigns are more prevalent at the higher levels of the ladder, with 67% of PTTC campaigns reaching ‘Enduring Icon’ level, versus 33% of non-PTTC campaigns.

Key quote

“PTTC establishes both a compelling imperative and a helpful roadmap for overcoming the often siloed worlds of product, marketing, go-to-market, and customer loyalty. It is now crystal clear that if a company isn’t making a clear PTTC, it is wasting its advertising spending for no reason other than engrained bad habits,” said Roger Martin, CEO advisor, strategist and author of the study. 

“A unified B2B go-to-market mental model is something that is absolutely revolutionary,” he told Cannes Lions delegates. 

The study

Drawing on WARC’s extensive database of B2B and B2C effectiveness case studies, over 2,000 award entrants and winning advertising campaigns from the last five years (2018-2022) were analysed, of which 40% (808) were identified as having made a credible promise to the customer. 

The full report is available to read here. A four-part series of WARC podcasts, in partnership with The B2B Institute at LinkedIn, will follow. It takes a deep dive into the findings of this new research.

Key findings of this study were first presented at Cannes Lions by Jann Martin Schwarz of LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, and strategy expert Roger Martin. A follow-up session will take place on Wednesday 21 June in the Palais des Festivals, Cannes.