From Promise to Proof: Building Brands Through Service Design
False Comfort in Promises
When I first entered the world of brand work, what impressed me most was how airtight it all looked. Strategy decks laid out identities with sharp words and elegant diagrams. Campaigns told stories with emotional polish. Brand guidelines dictated colours, fonts, even how much whitespace should sit around a logo.
On paper, it was perfect.
But reality was less forgiving. I remember a family at the electricity company counter, ready to open an account, only to be told the previous tenant’s unpaid debt had blocked the address. They returned with their lease, their IDs, every proof of residency, but were sent between the landlord, the utility office, and the vanished previous tenant in an endless loop. The cruel irony: they had money to pay their own bills, but the system saw an address, not a person, and no one would simply solve the problem.
That moment stayed with me. Because it exposed a truth: a brand only exists when it is experienced. A claim in a brand book is a hypothesis. The service is the experiment that proves or disproves it. And the customer is the judge.
It was my first deep lesson in the delivery gap: the space between what companies believe they offer and what customers actually receive.
Seeing the Loop
As I moved deeper into customer experience and eventually into service design leadership, the delivery gap kept reappearing. I started sketching out patterns, trying to understand why so many brand promises collapsed at the moment of truth.
What emerged was a loop:
- Promise. The brand defines what it stands for.
- Standards. Those promises shape the features and services offered.
- Expectations. Customers form mental pictures of what should happen.
- Moment of truth. The service interaction either keeps or breaks the promise.
- Perception. From that moment, loyalty and advocacy rise — or collapse.
- Learning. Feedback and data flow back, refining or reshaping the promise.
The insight was simple: brands are not made in campaign launches. They are made in loops of delivery and perception.
Once I saw the loop, I couldn’t unsee it. Every time a company over-invested in slogans while under-investing in journeys, I knew the loop would break. Every time a promise was scaled without operational support, I could almost hear the trust leaking out.
The loop became my lens for evaluating not only services but entire organisations.
Reframing Service Design as Brand Work
For years, service design was presented as a method for usability, touchpoint orchestration or process improvement. Those things matter. But I began to realise: at its core, service design is brand building.
Every journey is a brand story.
Every interaction is a brand statement.
Every failure is brand erosion.
That reframing changed how I approached my own work.
When I led digital experience in telecom, my task wasn’t just to launch apps or optimise features. It was to prove the brand’s promise of being a trusted, innovative companion in people’s lives. A chatbot wasn’t just a cost-saving tool; it was a signal of whether the brand was responsive and human. A digital ID system wasn’t just about compliance; it was about trust at the core of identity.
The same applied when I advised on SaaS products. A dashboard wasn’t just an interface; it was the embodiment of the brand’s promise of clarity and control. If the data didn’t load fast enough or the metrics didn’t make sense, the brand’s credibility dissolved in seconds.
Once you see service design as brand work, you stop treating “branding” as someone else’s department. You bring brand teams into service design conversations, and you bring service insights into brand positioning. The aim is not just smoother processes but coherence: promises that are credible because they are lived.
Lessons in Alignment
This shift also forced me to collect lessons — reminders that I still return to.
- Don’t overpromise. A modest claim with a strong service creates more advocacy than a bold claim with weak delivery. I have seen services delight customers simply because they exceeded a humble expectation.
- Don’t hoard knowledge. Brand trackers, CX surveys, journey maps — too often they sit in different silos. Yet the richest insights come when data crosses boundaries. A brand tracker can reveal emotional resonance that a service team never sees. A journey map can show operational gaps that brand teams overlook.
- Don’t forget the basics. Brands love to talk about differentiation, about what makes them special. But if the hygiene factors fail — the billing system doesn’t work, the customer support line drops calls — no differentiator will matter. As the Kano model reminds us: customers expect basics to work. Exciters are wasted if they don’t.
These lessons also shifted the questions I asked.
As service designers, I began asking: How do we embed our unique identity into the journey? Not just making things efficient, but making them distinct.
As brand guardians, I challenged teams to ask: What are the real customer needs and issues? Not just what differentiates us, but what truly matters at the moment of truth.
These cross-questions created alignment — not because they solved every conflict, but because they forced both sides to see each other’s blind spots.
From Reflection to Practice
Looking back, I see a career arc shaped by this conviction: branding and service are not separate. They are one system.
When brand lives only in campaigns, it becomes fragile. When service lives only in operations, it becomes invisible. It is only when the two reinforce each other — when the promise is both said and lived — that trust is built.
I’ve carried this conviction into boardrooms, client projects, and advisory conversations. And every time, I return to the same provocation: The brand is not painted on afterwards. It is designed into the system from the start.
The most valuable role service design leaders can play is to ensure coherence between promise and proof. That coherence is the true foundation of brand equity. And the way to achieve it is deceptively simple: start with user needs, make things simple, and be consistent — principles long codified in the Service Standard or Stanford’s “Design Principles”.
Epilogue — What I Learned
We live in an era where brand claims are scrutinised instantly, where customer expectations evolve daily, and where loyalty is fragile. The temptation is to polish the promise ever more finely, to craft slogans that shine brighter. But shine without substance is hollow.
The truth is harsher but freeing:
A brand is only as strong as the experience that delivers it.
And for those of us who lead in service design, the responsibility is clear. Our work is not simply about mapping journeys or orchestrating touchpoints. It is about building brands — not in theory, but in practice, in systems, in the lived reality of customers.
What I learned is that service design is not just a supporting act. It is brand work.
Every promise is a test.
Every service is the proof.
And every moment of truth is the brand.
