Driving brand commitment is a major goal for organizations. Gartner defines brand commitment as ‘the degree to which audiences prefer the brand to alternatives (brand preference), feel a personal connection to it (brand connection) and advocate on its behalf (brand advocacy)’. Thus brand preference, brand connection, and brand advocacy are all subsets of brand commitment.
Now, once solidified, brand commitment is more than just a regular revenue growth strategy. Brand commitment can drive customers to purchase your products at a premium. It drives customer loyalty and advocacy, where the customer promotes your brand on your behalf. Internally, employees already working with the brand seek to be retained, while human talent scouring for opportunities are attracted to your brand. Thus the need for creating brand preference and commitment is clear.
Creating A Strong Positioning
Now, there are 3 kinds of benefits that a brand can provide: functional, societal, and personal. An organization can choose to position itself using any one or more than one type of the 3 benefits, to initiate brand commitment. To drive preference, brands need to create strong positioning, which can be done by
- Avoiding negative advocacy – this is done by branding through functional benefits
- Communicating a personal benefit that a consumer can derive by being associated with your brand, and demonstrating simultaneously, how the fulfillment of that personal benefit leads to a ‘greater good’, i.e. societal benefit
Personal benefit is understood as a psychological need that a customer fulfills via brand association, while societal benefits range from ethical production, like zero or negative carbon emission, to any other sustainability initiative.
Positioning Through Personal Benefits, Or Using a Combination of Benefits?
Gartner estimates, from a 2022 research conducted among 1,999 consumers, employees, and B2B buyers, that while providing a personal benefit, like a sense of belonging or a sense of growth, is almost thrice as impactful as the other 2 types of benefits, the type of industry matters too. Positioning through personal benefits yielded the best rewards in the manufacturing, healthcare, and natural resources industries. Brand commitment in the technology industry is boosted through functional benefits, while the same connection works between retail and societal benefits.
Brands can use all the 3 benefits at once or combine personal and functional benefits for best results. The latter is because lack of functional benefits drives negative advocacy, so avoiding that, and inserting the impact of personal benefits for positive outcomes, is the best recipe.
Societal benefits combined with personal benefits as your brand positioning to drive brand commitment is also good, but excluding personal benefits to combine functional and societal benefits yields the least favorable results, comparatively speaking.
How Will You Position Your Brand?
Even if you miss out on customers actively advocating for your brand, or feeling a core connection with it, you can still focus on making your brand preferable over the others by choosing the right set of benefits as per your industry and other relevant factors. Just make sure that you include personal benefits in your brand messaging.
Organizations can use these 9 categories as frameworks to develop their own positioning through personal benefits:
- A sense of belonging – Making customers feel like they are a part of a certain community
- Life purpose – Making customers feel like they can achieve their ambitions through your brand
- Growth – Self-explanatory; making customers feel like they can achieve personal development through your product/service
- Self-consistency – Basically telling the customer ‘You live a certain life; adopt our product/service to be consistent with the way you live your life’
- Autonomy – Helping the customer take charge of their life, or be independent
- Competence – Related to autonomy; helping people feel competent, or experts, in something
- Security – In other words, offering peace of mind
- Esteem – Telling the customer ‘Associate with our product/service and feel confident’
- Energy – Providing adventure, or entertainment, or the strength needed to go through life, as an offering
Regardless of How You Position It..
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We credit Gartner with all observations taken from their survey report