Do You Keep Your Promise?

I don’t know about you, but there are times that I say of course I will do something, help out someone, take care of an errand, and a few days later I groan.  Why did I ever promise to do that?  But, I made a promise, and so I strive to honor it, to keep it.  There is something about keeping a promise that allows people to depend on you, to trust you. 

While that is true for us as individuals, did you know that it is also true for our parishes, our ministries, our schools?  For organizations, the promise is made through the “brand”.  I know that we in service of our faith hesitate to use that word; but let me explain.  We hear the word brand and think money, money, money.  But truly, a brand is a promise your organization is making to those they serve.  Like any promise, it needs to be kept.  All too often, it is very difficult to keep a promise when you are a parish, ministry or school.  Yet, just like us as individuals, if your parishioners or members believe you are breaking your promise to them, they may ask themselves if they can trust you or depend on you.

Understanding branding and how it supports your organization in connecting with your audience is critical to your evangelization efforts.  However, brand strategy feels like a complex topic, especially when we are not used to considering our efforts as a parish or ministry as a brand.  We strive in the book Marketing God, and the podcast to break it down into bite sized pieces so that by working through the concepts you can consider your parish or ministry through the lens of brand strategy.  Through my lens, the topic of branding is very timely as we emerge from COVID and the various protocols.  As you seek to re-engage with others, this is an opportune time to consider your promise, how you convey it and importantly, whether you keep it.

So this week in The Marketing God Podcast, we are explore brand strategy.  In the podcast we tackle the key strategic elements of brand building, including defining your promise and how to use that to guide your marketing efforts.  We start the week with the topic that your brand is your promise.  Then we delve into differentiation, brand positioning, effective taglines and the importance of consistency in building your brand.  The truths we use from the book this week are Truth 6 - A Brand Is A Promise, Truth 25 – Consumers Will Not Buy If You Are Not Different, Truth 21 – Great Positions Endure, Truth 26 – The Best Taglines are Meaningful, Memorable and Motivating, and Truth 32 – Consistency Builds, Compromise Destroys.

As before, there are worksheets with each podcast linked in the description.  This week, the worksheets sometimes have several pages to help you explore the topic at hand.  As before, all the podcasts for this week dropped overnight.  So, you can listen to one a day or all at one time, whatever works best for you. You can find the podcasts on any of your favorite podcast apps or at media.donnaaheckler.com. 

If you want to join a community of people trying to determine how to reach more people feel free to join the Marketing God Facebook group where we hope to work together and offer ideas and solutions that everyone can use. We continue to pray that these tools help you, your parish and ministry inspire those you support to become loyal to God!