What are the key elements of a brand reputation strategy and how do you align it with your business goals?

In my experience, you must also balance the short- and long-term expectations of your brand strategy. There will always be bumps in the road, but any over-reaction to the short-term bumps may be a detriment to the long-term strategy.

Your brand identity is the essence of your company; it captures your values, purpose, and personality and shapes the way you want to be seen by your customers and stakeholders. To make a lasting impression and differentiate yourself from the competition, it's crucial to create an emotional connection with your audience. Additionally, your brand identity should be adaptable and evolve over time to keep up with changes in your business, market trends, and customer needs, while still staying true to your core values and beliefs. Remember, your brand identity is not just a logo or a set of colors, but a living, breathing representation of who you are and what you stand for as a company.

A good brand identity is more than just a set of attributes and elements...it should define an experience that is memorable, engaging, relevant and resonant with customers. Creating and delivering a brand experience is what will enable you to flex for different situations, regions and channels yet build customer recognition and loyalty. Lastly, if a brand experience is purposefully built to achieve measurable business objectives, you can better track performance over time.

For me brand identity and reputation are one in the same thing. The identity is the science and reputation the fulfilment and longevity of the brand and how it is received by new acquisitions and how it is part of the DNA of those who are retained or dedicated users/followers of a brand (based on either product, service, or affiliated because of what it represents). The science is in creating brand, product and service propositions and then factoring that alongside commercial objectives and then ensuring that the marketing functions fulfil the 'structure' through the media channels available. If these things are established at point of brand then there should be a consistency of tone/voice and message that is both deliberate.

“Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.” (Elon Musk) Interesting quote given that most people feel Elon has destroyed Twitter reputation. “Brand is the holistic sum of customers’ experiences, composed of visual, tonal and behavioral brand components, many of which are shaped by interaction design.” (Kate Kaplan) This sums it up perfectly! For me brand identity begins at the point of 'inception'. The establishment or starting point of an institution or activity, product or service. Then comes the evolution and ability to adapt with technology and life!

Some amazing things can happen when you listen to your customers and seek to understand things from their point of view. When your brand takes a hit, in the form of a bad online review for example, it's not the time to get defensive. Run toward the issue, ask follow-up questions, help the customer and learn. Not only might this keep the same issue from popping up again, but people are often watching. When current and future customers see you working to solve problems for people like them, it makes an impression. Mistakes happen and, while we can also work to minimize them, how your organization handles them matters. Your behavior becomes part of your brand.

Reputation can be measured in a number of ways. In the digital sphere its via the metrics of analysis available to us; through various service providers and technology that gives 'meaningful' insights; that then allow strategy and planning to have a deliberate focus. Giving us the marketeer the opportunity to go away and implement insight driven activity that targets the customer with personaliation and 'relevance' at the right time, through the correct identified media of the recipients choice. These metrics allow us to understand consumer choice regarding our brand. Commercial success is always a good indicator. Social media is a good way to follow and gauge users feelings and a companies brand reputation in a dynamic environment.

Given the advent of social media marketeers certainly have ease of access to dealing with complaints, crises etc in real time. Maintaining a high level of engagement that's visible and instantly manageable. This is so long as there are clearly defined polices and procedures and crisis management strategies that are in place to deal with this. That brand advocates and influencer's are reputable, trustworthy and aligned. In addition your brand and company has in place the dedicated resource to deal with such situations. I found doing the hubspot social media paper a valuable resource tool in learning about crisis management regarding brand reputation.

It's crucial to remember that even the most meticulously crafted brand management strategy can fail if it's executed by unqualified, dishonest, or careless individuals—those who behave unprofessionally. In my experience, it's not uncommon to find business owners and company executives who are sure they've successfully developed a brand management process, yet they rely heavily on internal reports rather than external environment analysis. In the past, "mystery shopping" was a popular method for monitoring these processes. Nowadays, you can simply monitor social media to see whether your efforts to build a company's reputation are achieving the level of success you expect.

In addition to the strategies already mentioned above, it is paramount to underscore the importance of practicing transparency, ethical behavior, and social responsibility in all aspects of your brand. Such practices can foster trust, loyalty, and advocacy among your customers and stakeholders, ultimately enhancing your brand reputation. Moreover, investing in customer service, support, and engagement across all touchpoints is often underestimated. It is essential to ensure customers receive prompt and satisfactory responses, regardless of how they interact with your brand. Such consistency can help to strengthen your brand's image and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

These days many brands are looking at their CSR policy to improve reputation. What are they aligned with and what causes do they support. Does this align with the brands core values. Does a high end sports manufacturer align with sweatshops of sub south east Asia on less than a minimum wage for example in producing the goods. We live an age of ease of access to information. What degree of transparency is there. What messages are we putting out. What messages are others putting out. What are our competitors saying about us. What are others saying of our competitors. There are many levels to this and therefore one really needs to manage ones own brand ethically and be seen to add value in product and service.

Commercial objectives will always be the number 1 goals. Any organisation or service provider, product or brand tell you otherwise...they're lying. We are here to make money or increase sales or have greater market share (unless your focus is not for profit - where goals and branding etc is significantly different in tone, voice etc). I believe that commercial objectives should always be first (what do we want to achieve?) Then how does marketing fulfil the implementation of this. Aligning the two is paramount. Because then there in place determined measures to assess the success of marketing activity. And if marketing activity exceeded those expectations then its a win - win situation for both brand and the operational delivery.

In my experience, one of the critical aspects of brand reputation strategy is finding the right balance between short-term and long-term goals. Sometimes it's tempting to react very quickly to some issues appeared. However, too quick fixes can undermine long-term brand strategy. Brands that constantly change course or react impulsively to negative feedback may lose the trust and loyalty of their customers. The key is to create a brand reputation strategy that allows for flexibility and quick response, while still holding onto the core values and mission of the brand. This involves robust social media monitoring, and a focus on customer satisfaction.

Customer journey. Significantly important in developing a brand and maintaining the brand/consumer relationship. At each stage it will be different depending on the point of entry of your user. It will determine the message and how it’s delivered and what as a marketer you seek to achieve at those points of entry. The science of getting this right and road mapping that journey along with the analytics and analysis will help craft the correct messages at that correct entry point. For example; new customer - selling that brand. Long standing customer - the relationship over time (new product range etc, brand loyalty) etc. So propositions teams are vital to brand building in my humble opinion