Customers shopping for a new product face a choice between Brand A and Brand B. Over the past decade, Brand A has established a reputation for selling high-quality products, treating employees well, and contributing to its community through charitable efforts. Brand B has recently been in the news for selling customer data after years of suspicious business practices.
Which brand will most customers buy from? You likely knew the answer before you even read the question.
Business leaders instinctively understand that a business’s reputation plays a significant role in its success — or struggles. A strong brand reputation will help attract new customers, retain current customers, and improve revenue, while a negative reputation can have the opposite effect.
Businesses must ensure their reputations are as strong and resilient as possible. This guide will walk you through how to build a stronger brand reputation, along with some helpful tips and tricks to support you along the way.
What makes a strong brand reputation?
Businesses of any size and in any industry can develop a strong, positive reputation. It’s not about what you sell. It’s about how your company treats everyone — customers, employees, your community — and how that behavior informs people’s perception of your brand.
Core components of brand reputation
Your brand reputation is a combination of many factors, although they may not all carry equal weight. They include:
- Customer perception and experience: What do customers think of your brand? Regardless of whether or not they’ve had any direct experience purchasing from your business, how do they feel about it?
- Product/service quality and reliability: Do you sell high-quality products or services that consistently get good reviews? Can customers count on your products/services to be reliable?
- Values alignment with target audience: What values does your brand hold? How do they compare to your target audience’s key values?
- Consistent branding across all touchpoints: Is your branding consistent across your website, social media, brick-and-mortar locations, customer service, and other channels? For example, would someone get a very different impression of your brand by looking at your social media compared to visiting one of your stores?
- Online presence and social proof: What kind of online presence do you maintain, if any? What do your customers and other consumers say about your brand online?
Each of these elements is just one piece of the puzzle that makes up your brand reputation. Remember that you’re trying to look at the big picture here. Even if one customer thinks your products are unreliable, if customers generally believe your brand offers high-quality products, that’s positive for your reputation.
The difference between brand identity and reputation
People often confuse brand identity and brand reputation, but they’re not the same thing. Brand identity is how your business presents itself to the world through elements like your logo, language, and visual style. Brand reputation is how the world perceives your brand.
These elements work together. People see your brand identity and use that information, along with information from other sources, to form an opinion about your business.
Consider brands like:
- Patagonia, an outdoor clothing company
- Costco, a membership warehouse store
- Chewy, a pet subscription company
Although these brands operate in very different industries, they have all successfully established a brand identity that helps fuel their strong brand reputations.
The business impact of brand reputation
It’s tricky to calculate the precise dollar value of a strong reputation, but don’t doubt that it’s one of the most valuable assets a business can have. That’s why successful companies often invest considerable time, effort, and money into building their reputations — there’s a great return on investment both money- and sentiment-wise.
Benefits of a positive brand reputation
A stronger brand reputation fuels benefits like:
- Customer loyalty and retention: Customers are more likely to begin buying and keep buying from a business with a positive reputation.
- Premium pricing potential: The competitive edge a positive brand reputation offers will help you show customers that your products or services are worth a premium price.
- Crisis resilience: If your company experiences a crisis, your strong reputation can help you recover from it.
- Talent attraction and retention: Top employees want to work for the best employers, so your brand reputation can aid in hiring and retention efforts.
The dangers of brand dilution
Conversely, diluting your brand can hurt your business’s ability to succeed. Brand dilution occurs when your brand loses power, often as a result of expanding into too many unrelated categories.
For example, if a fine jewelry brand also launched inexpensive computer accessories, that would dilute its perception as an exclusive luxury brand. That’s an extreme example, but the idea is that poor brand extensions indicate the business isn’t focused and may not be maintaining consistent quality and purpose.
A more common example of brand dilution is inconsistent messaging. When a business says one thing but does another or simply says two contradictory things, customers lose trust in that business, and the brand reputation weakens.
Damage to your reputation can lead to lower customer loyalty, trouble attracting new customers, and lost revenue. Carefully manage your brand to prevent dilution and associated harm to your reputation.
How to build a strong brand reputation
It takes time to build a brand reputation that can help your business. The actions you take now will lay the foundation for your success, so start making moves today.
Define your brand identity
Start by defining your brand identity and messaging. Who are you as a brand? What’s most important to you?
Write down your brand mission statement (what your purpose is) and vision (your long-term aspirations for the future). Try to identify at least three core values for your brand that align with your target audience’s values.
From there, you can move on to developing your brand voice and visual identity. Make these elements unique to your brand so that anyone who sees them can connect them to you.
Be authentic. Customers are smart and can see through the veneer of shallow branding meant to appease them.
Deliver consistent brand experiences
Consistency is key to maintaining a strong brand reputation. What’s more persuasive: one customer’s single good experience, or many customers having several positive experiences with the brand? The more often you can deliver great brand experiences, the better!
Commit to providing excellent customer service to every person who reaches out to you. Product and service quality are equally important, so implement a quality assurance process that weeds out anything that doesn’t match your brand’s quality standards.
Ideally, every touchpoint a customer has with your brand should offer the same high-quality experience. Consistent branding makes your business appear more reliable and strengthens brand recognition.
Keeping branding consistent across multiple locations
If you have multiple storefronts, it’s vital to maintain consistent branding across all locations. Otherwise, a weaker location can dilute the whole brand’s reputation.
There’s still some room for flexibility, and you can (and should!) allow different locations to customize their marketing according to their target audiences. Just make sure each location stays consistent with your brand’s key values, visual identity, and commitment to quality.
If you have franchises, consider building a brand guide to share with each location. It should include things like:
- Your mission and vision statement
- Key phrases to use and avoid
- Visual identity, including logo, brand colors, and images to use
- Overview of brand personality
Develop a content strategy that reinforces your brand
You have the opportunity to reinforce the strong brand identity you want through the content you share. Work on creating relevant content that’s valuable to your target audience. That could be entertaining social media posts, helpful blogs and guides, or informative webinars.
The content you publish can position your brand as a thought leader in your industry, making you a trusted source that your audience turns to for information. If you combine that informative role with storytelling that connects with your audience, you have a recipe for solidifying a strong brand reputation. Customers will care about what you have to say and trust you to offer valuable insights.
Measuring brand reputation
Compared to integrated marketing campaigns or sales promotions, brand reputation efforts are more difficult to quantify. How do you know if your efforts to improve your reputation are working? Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your audience’s response.
Key metrics for brand reputation
Though they may not be obvious at first glance, some useful metrics will help you understand the strength of your brand reputation. These include:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Use your NPS to measure how likely customers are to recommend your products or services to others. Higher scores indicate a stronger brand reputation.
- Customer satisfaction surveys: Measure the satisfaction of your current customers by asking them to complete customer satisfaction surveys on a regular basis.
- Social media sentiment analysis: Get a general sense of how customers talk about your brand on social media and whether the sentiment is largely positive or negative. Review your brand mentions and invest in social listening tools to analyze how your business is perceived online.
- Review monitoring and management: Stay on top of your reviews to address any issues as quickly as possible and understand how customers perceive your brand.
Tools for tracking brand reputation
Evaluating your brand reputation can be challenging. If you ask two random people what they think of your brand, you’ll probably get two very different answers.
You’ll likely use a combination of tools to evaluate your business’s reputation. Look for programs like:
- Social listening platforms
- Review management software
- Analytics dashboards
- Customer feedback systems
Best practices for brand marketing to enhance reputation
Once you establish the core of your brand reputation, such as the quality of your products/services and commitment to customer service, you can further enhance it. Try strategies like engaging your local community and emphasizing authenticity.
Authenticity in brand communications
Today, perhaps more than ever, customers care about authenticity when purchasing from brands. They want to know that what your brand says means something, and that you’re walking the walk, not just talking the talk.
Make sure your actions align with your brand’s stated values. Avoid misleading or vague claims, and be forthcoming when customers ask for more details on upcoming events, collaborations, or charitable efforts. You’ll lose trust with your audience and damage your reputation if you can’t follow through on what you say. Be transparent about your marketing practices and respect your customers’ data privacy.
Leveraging social proof
Customers know that any ads or marketing messages that come directly from your brand are biased in your favor. Every business claims to have strong values, care about customers, and provide high-quality products or services. Customers are left trying to determine which brands are telling the truth and which are hiding behind pretty words.
Reassure customers that they can trust you by leveraging social proof in your favor. In marketing, social proof is the idea that people are more likely to buy from your brand if they see that someone else is happy with their purchase. Customer testimonials are a great example! Someone who’s on the fence about your brand might see strong testimonials from your previous customers and be persuaded to make a purchase.
For service providers, you can use case studies to share more in-depth information about the results you’ve produced for clients, allowing potential customers to see exactly what you’re capable of. Consider asking customers to share user-generated content — like video reviews, images featuring your products, or before-and-after photos from your services — to further persuade prospective shoppers.
Local brand-building strategies
With social media, your brand reputation extends to every corner of the world — no matter where people are located, they can hear about or interact with your business. However, you can make some of the biggest strides in your reputation by focusing closer to home.
Engage your community by supporting local causes, hosting events in the area, and networking with other small business owners nearby. Build relationships with local media and organizations.
You can also improve your local visibility online by focusing on local search engine optimization (SEO). If you don’t already have one, create a Google Business Profile so your business shows up on Google Maps. It’s completely free and easy to set up! Add local keywords to your listing and website to reach customers in your area, and promote your community involvement on your social media and other channels to boost visibility.
Your brand reputation journey: the path to lasting business success
A positive brand reputation is one of the most powerful tools to help your business succeed. The stronger your reputation is, the easier it will be to attract new customers, secure customer loyalty, and recruit top talent. It paves the path forward and provides a springboard for your success.
You don’t need to do it all at once. Businesses with excellent reputations today have built them over a long time, and every action counts. Start with small steps like defining your brand identity or improving your social media marketing.
Constant Contact can help you get started. Our social media tools make it easy to plan, create, and share content that enhances your brand reputation. Explore our social media marketing tools and learn how to take your brand to the next level!
