How Elephants Delicatessen wins customers with a great brand promise
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Dining out quickly loses its luster when you travel for work.
Several years ago, I had a long-term consulting project in Portland, Oregon. I'd fly in on a Monday, work crazy hours, and then fly home at the end of the week. I did this every week for several months.
Dining out for three meals a day makes it difficult to get proper nutrition. I needed to find a solution.
Fortunately, I discovered Elephants Delicatessen.
The Elephants brand promise is "Great local foods from scratch since 1979." That's exactly what it delivered—offering me a chance to get a tasty, healthy meal on the go.
I recently interviewed Cheyenne Terbrueggen, Marketing Communications Manager at Elephants to learn how the company keeps its brand promise and wins fans like me.
Here are a few of the questions that Terbrueggen answered. I've included the point in the interview where she answered it.
What makes a good brand promise? (1:51)
How can a brand promise help employees? (4:21)
How does a brand promise influence your marketing message? (9:40)
What makes a brand promise attractive to customers? (12:09)
How does a brand promise influence product decisions? (17:24)
You can watch the full interview or read the highlights below.
What makes a good brand promise?
Terbrueggen explained that the brand promise encapsulates everything that Elephants does in one simple, straightforward sentence.
Great local foods from scratch since 1979.
"When you put it all together, it's basic and it's straightforward, and it's friendly--all things that we want to be."
The first part, great local foods, reflects the company's commitment to sourcing fresh ingredients from the community.
"Ninety percent of our main suppliers are located within 200 miles of our stores," explained Terbrueggen.
The second part, from scratch, communicates that the food is home-made and reinforces the feeling of fresh, healthy, and tasty.
"We make everything ourselves," said Terbrueggen. "Everything you eat is something that we've made."
Finally, adding 1979 shows that Elephants has been doing it for a very long time. The company isn't just trying to be trendy—they've made a real commitment.
Terbrueggen referred to the brand promise as a tagline throughout the interview, since it plays such a prominent role in Elephants' marketing. Notice how it's clearly communicated on the company's home page.
Terbrueggen admitted there is often an impulse to change the brand promise. When she was first hired, she was asked to come up with some alternatives. Terbrueggen came up with several ideas, but none were as authentic and impactful as the existing one.
"As many times as I've tried to come up with a better tagline that states what we do, I just can't."
Hear more on this topic at 1:51 in the interview.
How can a brand promise help employees?
Many people think of a brand promise as something that's exclusively for marketing. Yet employees are the keepers of that promise.
"It's important for the consumer, it is," said Terbrueggen. "But we have 250 employees. And I can tell you that they all know our tagline."
A good brand promise functions as a company's customer experience vision. This is a shared definition of an outstanding experience that gets all employees on the same page.
At Elephants, the brand promise helps employees understand what they do and guides their daily work.
Terbrueggen explained that it's often used as a way to simplify all that the company does into one simple message. "We do so many things, it's nice to have a really descriptive, straightforward tagline."
New employees learn about the tagline in their initial training. They hear multiple leaders talk about it, and what it means. It then becomes an integral part of their jobs.
This discussion starts at 4:21 in the interview.
How can a brand promise simplify your marketing message?
Many marketers confide that crafting the right message is a struggle. Companies offer so many products and services to many different types of customers.
Sometimes, it can be difficult to distill that down to one clear message.
Terbrueggen explained that she always comes back to the tagline whenever there's any doubt. It helps answer the question, "When there's so much to say, what's the one thing I should say?"
Elephants has run advertisements that focus exclusively on the tagline. Executives reference it as talking points during interviews. It even influences product decisions.
"Everything we do that's important for people to know is in the tagline," said Terbrueggen.
Go to the 9:40 mark to hear more.
How can a great brand promise attract more customers?
This was a fun segment of the interview, because it gave me a chance to tell Terbrueggen why I'm a fan of Elephants.
Customers ultimately buy products and services to help them solve a problem. A good brand promise speaks clearly to a specific problem a customer is trying to solve.
As a business traveler, the problem I needed to solve was to get a healthy, tasty meal on the go. I didn't want another heavy meal weighing me down. Elephants solved that problem nicely, and I ate there regularly.
One important side note is that I discovered Elephants through word-of-mouth. My clients routinely ordered lunch from Elephants, so I got to experience the quality myself.
Companies that have a strong brand promise make it easier for existing customers to refer the company to new customers. They can use the brand promise to help describe what makes the company special.
Listen to the full discussion at 12:09.
How does a brand promise influence product decisions?
Customer-focused companies often take a cross-functional approach to creating new products and services. The goal is to create something that customers will not only love, but that the company is capable of consistently delivering.
In my book, The Guaranteed Customer Experience, I profiled multiple companies like Osprey Packs, Domino's, and Briggs & Riley that involve marketing, repairs, customer service, and other departments when developing new products.
The same is true at Elephants, where marketing, chefs, and procurement work together to create menu items. Ultimately, the availability of fresh, local ingredients determines whether or not a menu item can be offered.
"We wanted to do strawberry muffins this week but we can't, because we can't get great strawberries," said Terbruggen. "We can get good blueberries right now, so we're doing blueberry sour cream muffins instead."
Elephants regularly changes its menu to ensure it's keeping its promise of providing fresh local foods from scratch.
"We'd rather do that than purchase something that's not fresh and local," said Terbrueggen. "We have to be guided by what's available and what our suppliers have."
More on this at the 17:24 mark in the interview.
Take Action
First, make sure you visit Elephants the next time you are in Portland.
If you can't make it to Portland anytime soon, check out the Elephants website. Notice how the tagline is clearly communicated. (You can also order gift boxes!)
Next, discuss these questions with your team to implement these concepts in your own organization:
What is our brand promise?
Do we communicate it clearly to our customers?
Do we communicate it clearly to employees?
How can we be sure our employees know the brand promise?
What do we do to ensure our brand promise is kept?
This last one is just for fun.
Portlandia, a TV show that poked fun at many of Portland's eccentricities, had this wonderful sketch about the importance of food being truly local.