Brand Reputation: What It Means and How to Build It

Imagine the hyperconnectivity we have with humans from the remotest corner of the world! One bad tweet or a LinkedIn post is all it takes to disrupt your brand’s reputation that you’ve built over the years. It’s unfair, but it’s the reality. Gone are the days when brand reputation was just a nice-to-have—cometh the days where it’s every brand’s lifeline.

The world we are in where false information spreads faster than the truth. Trust isn’t an easy tool to build, one bad PR is all it takes. But what truly changes the game? Your brand and the way you build it.

Yes, conventional approaches and traditional Brand Reputation-building strategies can help. But we aren’t going deeper into them. There are a plethora of blogs already written and crafted about that.

In this blog, we are going to discuss the top actionable, uncommon strategies that will make you win as a brand. We’ll also give you tips and tricks on where you should channel your energy and focus as a founder or business leader.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Understanding Brand Reputation

Brand Reputation is basically how your brand is perceived by your stakeholders. It determines whether your brand is positively or negatively influencing your customers, shareholders, investors, prospective employees, and even laypeople. 

You must have heard about personal branding for working professionals and why it is so important. Needless to say, having a great personal brand helps you make professional connections faster, attract recruiters and future employers, and find new opportunities for professional success easily.

Now, apply the concept of personal branding to your brand, and that’s exactly what Brand Reputation is. It’s your brand’s face without masks. 

Why Brand Reputation Matters and How to Get It Right

Your brand reputation is more than just a reflection of your financial success. It’s the emotional connection your stakeholders have with your brand—simply put, how they feel when they hear about your brand. You might have done 100 things right, but one bad thing can cost you all that you’ve earned. 

Studies say that 67% of customers would stop buying from you due to ethical concerns if they find any issues with your reputation.

Think of Brand Reputation as the bridge between perception and reality. The way your stakeholders make choices is by identifying you as good or bad. Once they do, they start ranking you. The sad truth here is that the process of evaluating choices is largely influenced by the information presented about your brand. If your brand is presented well, your stakeholders are influenced positively. If it’s presented negatively, they don’t want to give you a chance. It’s as simple as that. Build brand reputation that leaves a lasting legacy. 

Factors Affecting Your Brand Reputation

Let’s first understand the factors affecting your Brand Reputation. Then, it’ll be easier to discuss how to improve them.

1. Customer Experience

Customer Experience plays a significant role in your Brand Reputation management strategies. We live in a world where the buyer journey is more complex than ever. Unfortunately, what we think of as the buyer journey often doesn’t align with reality. For high-involvement purchases requiring significant financial planning, buyers usually take weeks or months just to make a decision.

What do they do during this process?

Your buyers spend more time researching and consulting with their peers to decide if this product/service is right for them at this point. They consider the long-term benefits of buying your product, and not to forget, they spend significant time evaluating risks.

The truth is that buyers don’t just remember what they buy—they remember what they feel. Reports suggest 73% of people see customer experience as a key factor in their purchasing decisions.

Customer experience is critical because the buyer's decision-making process is deeply influenced by how they perceive and interact with your brand at every stage. A seamless, positive customer experience can actually shorten the time it takes to make a purchasing decision.

Care about delivering exceptional customer experience for your buyers? Use our ready-made customer experience survey to collect feedback at every step of your buyer’s journey. Increase brand reputation by focusing on customer experience.

2. Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy is one of the crucial factors that affects your Brand Reputation.

Your employees are your brand’s biggest reputation ambassadors. They do more good than harm if they care for your company’s growth. But if they are dissatisfied, they can derail your entire recruitment game. We’ve seen companies fail to hire exceptional talent because of present employees’ dissatisfaction or past employees’ negative Glassdoor reviews.

On the flip side, a highly motivated employee can significantly improve your business performance and outcomes.

Some data for you:

A motivated employee contributes 21% to business profitability.

They also contribute to 59% less employee attrition.

Source: Link

What does the data say?

Your reputation can’t solely rely on delighting your customers—you should care for your employees too.

Identify employee concerns and resolve them at the earliest. Don’t wait for the concerns to blow up before taking action.

Want to know how your current employees’ feel in your organisation? Create an Employee Experience survey in less than a minute and collect authentic, filter-free feedback and incorporate it into your business improvement strategies. 

3. Crisis Management

Every company goes through a crisis, and that’s inevitable on the path to company’s success. Most often than not, it isn’t a crisis that is registered in the consumer’s mind, but how you respond to it. 

Handling crises effectively builds a higher level of trust with stakeholders and consumers. They look at you as someone who knows how to manage difficult times and bounce back in delivering excellent product and customer experiences.

So, if your company is going through a crisis, remember that tough times don’t last. Take a step back, get your fundamentals right, learn from your mistakes and be back on track. 

It’s tough, but it isn’t impossible. 

We’ve seen companies doing this. 

Let’s take a quick look at a  company who had handled their well crisis and notably increased it’s brand reputation 

Johnson and Johnson Tylenol Crisis [1982]

Johnson and Johnson, an American healthcare and pharmaceutical company that owns significant household names in the healthcare consumer product segment had to face a terrible crisis in 1982. 

What really happened? 

7 consumers died after consuming Tylenol capsules that were tampered with and laced with Cyanide. 

How did they respond? 

• The company recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol from shelves, which costed them close to $100 million
• They introduced an innovative tamper-proof packaging that set an industry standard
• Best thing? They kept communicating with the media and the public with absolute transparency till the issue was completely resolved and updated the public about their response in addressing the issue 

Outcome? 

• Johnson and Johnson had emerged as a product leader in the healthcare and medicinal product space, regaining massive consumer trust
• Tylenol recovered 30% market within a few months 

Lessons for us? 

• Always prioritise consumers over your numbers if you want to build an enduring company with long lasting success.
• Proactively communicating and build a transparent culture, it gains trust like you’ve never imagined. 

Proven Strategies to Increase Brand Reputation Effectively

It’s clear that brand reputation is influenced by both controllable and uncontrollable factors. While you can’t control everything, there are proven strategies to increase your brand presence and reputation:

1. Be Transparent & Authentic 

Transparency is critical for building trust. Accept flaws openly and communicate about them to stakeholders—it shows accountability. Here’s how you can increase brand reputation and win customer trust:

• Build in public: Share what you’re creating and why.
• Leverage social media: Highlight success stories, valuable blogs, and updates.
• Address reviews: Showcase positive reviews and actions taken to resolve negative ones.
• Encourage client testimonials: Request existing clients to feature your brand in their LinkedIn or Twitter posts.
• Brag humbly: If you’re building something brag-worthy, share it authentically.
• Establish a PR presence: Engage with thought leaders and offer trials or incentives to showcase your brand. 

In short, build brand reputation that inspires trust and admiration.

2. Engage with Negative Reviews 

Responding to negative reviews gracefully can turn criticism into an opportunity.

• Customer complaints aren’t noise—they’re your free masterclass in improvement.
• Maintain a positive and empathetic tone when responding.
• Instances where Whatsapp was down for millions of users, Slack stopped working, and Crowdstrike's outage affected airline passengers are good examples on how to engage with negative reviews. These companies accepted their flaws in the system and promised proactive measures that they’ve taken to resolve the flaws.
• Highlight where you went wrong and why. Write a blog about these areas and post it on Social Media. Do talk about what you are doing to address them.
• Build brand reputation that creates a positive impact

3. Be Transparent about your business Growth 

Don’t reveal all your data in public. That’s not allowed, even for the sake of reputation building. There are a few business metrics that are confidential, and you should refrain from discussing them openly, while there are plenty of growth metrics that you can present to the public. Be mindful of what you choose to share.

Here are some quick tips:

• Noticed a positive trend in your finances? Why not highlight it? Remember, it’s important to bring visibility to your financial growth as your investors are watching. They are trying to gain confidence to invest in you.
• Have any product features that notably increased your sign-ups? Post about it on social media.
• Highlight your social media growth.
• What’s the employee attrition rate looking like? Is it good enough to share publicly?
• Talk about every little thing that will help your stakeholders build a positive frame of mind about your brand.

4. Employee Advocacy Matters

Brand reputation isn’t just about customer marketing and engagement. It is heavily influenced by what your employees say and feel about your company. Remember, your employees are your biggest and most trusted brand ambassadors. They have a voice powerful enough to gain public attention. So, focus on having happy employees at your workplace to increase brand reputation. 

Speaking of company values and cultural practices, a report from Edelman’s Trust Barometer suggests that employees rank higher in trust than CEOs and founders.

Now, let’s share some quick tips on how to focus on employee advocacy:

• Encourage your employees to post content that will positively influence your brand. This will help you amplify your reach.
• Positive employee sentiments attract greater talent. Get your employees to talk about your company values in public.
• Build a workplace where your employees feel heard, valued, and respected.
• Help them upskill. Invest in their career journey by providing training and resources.
• Recognize and reward your best employees, appreciating their hard work.

Boost Your Brand Reputation with SurveySparrow: Here’s How

We’ve spoken a lot about Brand Reputation. Now, we need a software that will literally help us execute everything we’ve discussed.

This is where SurveySparrow comes into the picture.

With SurveySparrow’s Reputation Management software, you can not only close the feedback loop but also gain insights that turn your business outcomes into a growth engine.

Discovering customer insights is absolutely non-negotiable. But how do you do it right without affecting your customer experience during the buyer’s journey? Our features are tailored to meet these exact needs.

AI-driven Insights

With SurveySparrow’s Reputation Management software, you get instant AI-driven insights that allow you to keep a tab on your reputation checks, fully automated.

• It also helps you track your reputation performance across all your social platforms.
• You can instantly identify how your customers feel about your brand, decode customer sentiments to understand exactly what’s going wrong, and fix issues at the earliest—before negative reviews impact your business performance.

Your Social Performance at One Place

Juggling between reviews? We understand—your social presence may attract reviews from different locations. Tracking and managing them can be an extremely daunting task. That’s where our centralized system helps you take complete control of all your social reviews in one place and manage them effectively.

• No matter how small your insights are, you shouldn’t overlook them. With our Reputation Management tool, we promise you won’t miss a single one.
• Responding to reviews has never been easier. Remember, your customers are tired of templated, robotic responses—don’t make that mistake again. With our Reputation Management tool, you can craft personalized AI responses for every review.

Reviews matter, yes. But your response to those reviews matters even more.

Less Human Intervention. More System Automation

We understand your employees are busy. They are already juggling so many things, and they don’t want to juggle reviews too.

• Reputation management requires proactivity. You can’t treat it like just another task. It requires customer empathy, keeping in mind business outcomes and problem-solving.
• That’s why we’ve automated your tasks end-to-end. From tracking and managing customer reviews to decoding their sentiments and contributing to your business outcomes, every single thing is automated.

Wrapping up!!!! 

To wrap it up, real results sell. You have no choice but to show genuine customer testimonials to your prospective clients when they're deciding whether or not to choose your product or service. Why not make the most of your testimonials by keeping them authentic and organic? Doing so can significantly boost your sales.

You’ve got this!

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