Is Your Brand Promise Future Proof?

Imagine it’s the mid-1800s, and you are the world’s best buggy maker.

No one can match your craftsmanship. You’ve found a way to make the buggy lighter than anyone else. Horses can pull it faster.

Your promise to your customers is clear: you get them to their destination faster than any other buggy on the road.

Then, one day, you hear a rumble in the distance. Someone has invented the car.

What do you do?

The trap most businesses fall into is focusing on what they’ve always done.

They would try to make the buggy even lighter. Polish the wood to a finer sheen. Make the cushions more plush.

They get so focused on the functional solution they deliver that they forget the real problem they solve for customers.

The promise had nothing to do with the buggy itself. It was about speed. They could get customers to their destination faster than anything else on the market.

The buggy just happened to be the type of vehicle they used to deliver on the promise.

The best company wouldn't improve the buggy. It would start working on a car.

The Success Trap

In hindsight, the buggy-maker’s choice seems obvious.

Yet, it’s a mistake that some of the most successful companies in history have made. They keep trying to improve what they’re doing.

The reason is simple, but dangerous: success creates inertia.

But it can make you forget what customers want.

The very expertise that builds a market-leading "buggy" creates a powerful resistance to the "car." A company’s identity becomes tied to the product it perfects.

Its processes, talent, and financial models are all optimized for the current way of doing business. It always feels safer to make incremental improvements to a proven winner than to bet on an unproven, disruptive idea that could cannibalize it.

This is how industry leaders sow the seeds of their own irrelevance: they become too loyal to past success.

And they forget to ask the simple question: what will the customers want?

The Innovator’s Dilemma: Kodak vs. The Future

No company illustrates the buggy-maker’s mistake more tragically than Kodak.

In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson invented the world’s first digital camera. It was the "car" to their "buggy."

But instead of embracing it, Kodak’s leadership buried the project. They couldn’t see how it fit into their film business.

They were so loyal to their product that they were disloyal to their promise.

Kodak’s promise to the world wasn't "we sell film." It was "we help you capture and share precious memories." For decades, film was the best way to deliver on that promise.

But digital made it easier and better for the average person to capture memories.

And when the world moved to digital, Kodak was left behind, ultimately filing for bankruptcy in 2012.

The Visionary’s Gambit: Netflix vs. Itself

Now, consider Netflix.

In the early 2000s, their promise was "on-demand entertainment delivered conveniently to your home." Their product was a DVD in a red envelope. And it was a massive success.

But when high-speed internet made streaming video a viable reality, CEO Reed Hastings faced a choice. He could protect his profitable DVD business, or he could honor his promise.

He chose the promise.

Netflix aggressively pushed into streaming, a move that required cannibalizing its own DVD-by-mail service.

Many at the time called it a mistake.

But Hastings understood he wasn't in the DVD business. He was in the entertainment delivery business.

He was willing to kill his own buggy to build a better car, securing his company's dominance for the next generation.

The Modern Mandate: Infosys vs. Complacency

This principle is just as critical today. Sumit Virmani, CMO of the successful technology services firm Infosys, understands that a brand’s offer isn't its product; it's what matters to its customers.

When the massive shift to cloud computing began, Infosys didn't just keep tweaking existing services. It launched Infosys Cobalt, a dedicated portfolio of cloud services designed to eliminate the chaos around cloud adoption for its clients.

As Virmani puts it:

The problem many businesses get into is that they are so focused on the functional solution they deliver that they forget the real problems they solve for customers.

What you offer your customers isn’t your product. Your offer is what matters to your customers.

How to Keep Your Promise Timeless

Is your business perfecting a buggy while the world is building a car?

To avoid this trap, you have to separate your product from your promise.

Ask these tough questions:

• What is our "buggy"? What is the specific product or service we sell today? Now, what is the fundamental human or business need it solves? That need is your true promise.

• What is the "car" on our horizon? What technological shifts, cultural changes, or new business models could deliver on our promise better than our current solution?

• How does our innovation serve the promise? Is your R&D budget focused on making a lighter buggy, or is it exploring what a new kind of power could do?

• Are we brave enough to make ourselves irrelevant? Like Netflix, would you be willing to disrupt your own successful product to deliver on your promise in a new, better way?

The most resilient brands are obsessively loyal to their customers' needs, not their own solutions.

It’s a leader’s job to look around the corner and steer the company toward the future, even if it means leaving a comfortable past behind.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Feeling like you're perfecting a world-class buggy while the industry is building cars? This is one of the biggest threats to an established business. Reply to this email, and let's set up a free 15-minute call to discuss how to keep your brand promise relevant for the future.