Whale Hunting begins with clarifying your brand promise—what are your most compelling promises to your prospective customers?  Can you simply and clearly differentiate your value proposition from those of your competitors?  When I work with companies, usually we discover that the brand promise is less “unique” than they thought—they are not distinctly separating out the “standard promises” – those that everyone in their business makes – from the true distinctive of their company, products, or services.
Here’s a way to test this premise in your company and also provide a road map for improvement.   We call it a Brand Promise Audit.
1.    Gather marketing information from your company and at least three competitors.  Print pages from their website and other marketing materials.  Make several copies of each collection.

2.    With your cross-functional team, ask everyone to browse through one set of materials with a pack of sticky notes handy.   They should write down “brand promises” that they read in the materials, putting only one promise statement on each sticky note.  Label the note “X” for a competitor and your company’s initials for your statements.

3.    Place the brand promises on one, two, or three flip charts (with 4-5 people working at a flip chart).  When everyone has finished browsing materials, gather at the flip charts.  Reorganize the notes, collecting all of the similar statements one on top of another.

4.    With one person recording on another flip chart, make a list of all the brand promises that are repeated several times.    These represent “standard promises.”  Your competitors make the same statements that you do.  All of your customers expect these benefits.  They constitute the price of admission.

Here’s an example of Standard Benefits:
•    We are a partner with you.
•    We react quickly to changes.
•    We promise excellent service.