Overpromise and Overdeliver: The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty
Product Description
Companies like American Girl, Best Buy, Washington Mutual, and TiVo came out of nowhere to virtually own their respective markets. How did they scoop their bigger and wealthier competition? It wasn’t through a fat marketing budget. It was because they kept their promises . . . and not just any promises, but dangerously ambitious promises. In fact, these companies overpromised to lure customers in—and then overdelivered to keep them. Rick Barrera, a … More >>
Overpromise and Overdeliver: The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty
Tags: Customer, Loyalty, Overdeliver, Overpromise, Secrets, Unshakable
The era of cost cutting is gone. Profit and growth must come by delivering outstanding value that brings deep customer loyalty, higher price points, and greater market share.
Rick Barrera provides a coherent roadmap and vivid examples of how focusing on your brand, and especially the employee behaviors that shape it, can bring immediate and lasting bottom line results.
I believe Rick represents the bleeding edge thinking that moves away from viewing brand as logos and images towards viewing brand as an organizing company-wide tool crticial to achieving a company’s strategy
Rating: 5 / 5
Today’s customers expect two things to happen when buying and consuming a product: the fulfillment of all of the product’s highest promises and the pleasure of being delighted with something in or about the product that’s totally unexpected. The goal, therefore, for any company today is to make products that can achieve this, thereby gaining enthusiastic customers who will not only patronize the company’s products, but, more importantly, tell others about it.
Reviewed by
Dominique James
Rating: 4 / 5
I saw Rick speak at a conference and I got his book shortly after. The content it good. He’s right in that creating a series of TouchPoints in your business is necessary. As a marketing consultant working with small businesses, one of the things we talk about is how their current TouchPoints add or take away from their brand.
What this book doesn’t do is explain marketing at a higher level. TouchPoints are one way to keep our current customers, but they don’t really help us get more customers. For that, I really liked the Rules of Attraction by Mark Deo. Deo goes through and explains the 14 ways to build attraction into a business. TouchPoints are one of the ways, but there are a lot more as well.
Rating: 4 / 5
We’ve all heard the slogan, “underpromise and overdeliver”–but Barrera points out that doing so weakens the marketing. It’s OK when you already have the customer, but to bring in the business, you must promise the moon–and deliver the moon and stars. The companies that make a bold brand promise, and follow through, are sitting pretty (as I point out in my own book, Principled Profit).
“A true brand promise would describe what the product or service will do for your target audience, how it is different from competing offers, and why a customer should buy it.”
Where do you get your core brand promise? From your customers! The better you listen and observe, the more you can understand why people come to you, and how to create an environment that so deeply addresses their issues that they won’t want to go anywhere else. This can help you actually reinvent your company in the marketplace.
And look for the hidden failures in other people’s brand promises, as in the hair salon owner, faced with another salon’s loss-leader, who put out the word that “we fix $6 haircuts.”
Whatever you do, avoid at all costs making a brand promise and then failing to deliver. As one example, Barrera cites continuous passenger snickering when dealing with rude and surly employees of the well-known airline that boasts, “Fly the friendly skies.”
One of the things I really like about this book is the way it translates specific initiatives to dollars saved and/or revenues earned. It shows the dollars-and-cents value of superior promising, and using “touch points,” both human and automated, to deliver–or overdeliver–on those promises.
Shel Horowitz’s award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, demonstrates how to build a business around ethics, environmental sustainability, and cooperative practices–and how to develop marketing that highlights those advantages.
Rating: 5 / 5
I first read Rick’s book about a year ago. Since then, I have referred to it on several occasions. The information he offers is applicable now and will be just as valuable as the years progress. I highly recommend this book to those who want to see their companies grow based on the customers’ needs, wants, and desires.
Rating: 5 / 5
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