From the way you create a logo, to the words you use in your website copy—each element shapes how the public feels about your products and perceives your brand. Today, with more channels and outlets for customers to interact with your company—both positively and negatively—brand reputation is important to all business success, regardless if you run a large-scale corporation or have your own side hustle.
A positive brand reputation—on and offline—means that customers not only trust your business, but they are likely to purchase your product or service. The key to a winning brand reputation strategy is recognizing that you don't have to wait for people to form their own opinions about your brand. Instead, by building your brand’s experiences around your target customers’ needs, wants, values and opinions, you can help shape how they perceive your company.
In this article, we’ll dive further into why brand reputation matters, the benefits of having a solid strategy in place and tips for building and maintaining it.
What is brand reputation?
Brand reputation is the perception that customers, employees, partners and others have of a brand. The stronger the reputation is, the more that people will trust and advocate for the brand.
This perception can be shaped by both direct and indirect experiences, and can also be influenced by factors outside the user experience. For example, people’s perception of a brand can be impacted by things like the company’s activism and philanthropy, internal employee policies, as well as its partners’ own brand reputations. Consumers can also be influenced by the buying behavior of their friends and family, or other influential people.
Brand reputation can change over time, on both an individual and societal scale. This is why it’s so important for companies to closely monitor and manage it.
The benefits of a strong brand reputation strategy
Take it from the world’s most successful brands and individuals: building a strong brand takes a lot of work. Having a brand reputation strategy will not only help you on your goal of achieving your ideal consumer and employer perception, but it will also become incredibly handy when your brand inevitably runs up against a crisis. If that wasn’t enough, take a look at some of the additional benefits of having a strong brand reputation strategy for your business.
Quickens your response to competition
Having a brand marketing strategy allows you to best identify which marketing or sales levers to pull when your company is dealing with a competitive threat. For example, if another corporate bakery delivery service opens up across town, touting lower prices, your brand reputation strategy will help guide your decisions. You’ll know if it's a better idea to prioritize a new marketing campaign that focuses on selling your existing client base on your homegrown spirit, or if it's better to narrow in on acquiring new customers in an unserviced area.
Stabilizes your employee growth
Thinking about how you want your operation to grow can help you create and sustain the internal company culture that you'll need to reflect outward. If you articulate how you want your brand to be perceived, it's easier to hire for cultural fit/identify good hires. People look for jobs where they feel fulfilled and are able to make a meaningful contribution to something they believe in. Companies with a clear brand identity and a well-founded brand reputation are the ones that will offer these kinds of opportunities to prospective employees.
With a great reputation both inside and outside, a company will have a more devoted workforce and lower levels of turnover and turmoil.
Creates more loyal customers
For many companies, the majority of their earnings come from a loyal and long-term customer set. By having a brand reputation strategy, you can more closely look at what marketing or sales avenues are more likely to generate brand loyalty.
For example, Amazon is a brand loyalty leader in the US as both an online retailer and a video streaming service. With their loyalty program Amazon Prime, committed customers join an exclusive membership and receive free two-day shipping, plus extra perks like video streaming and music. This develops brand trust and the ability to attract repeat customers and helps avoid brand dilution.
Ways to build and manage your brand reputation
In order to reap all the benefits (and none of the consequences), your brand needs a reputation management strategy that is both proactive and reactive. Here are some tips and tools to guide you.
01. Build your brand identity
Before you can even think about your reputation, you have to create a brand worth managing. Developing a strong and cohesive brand identity ensures that you have a clear understanding of what your company stands for, helps guide how to act in certain situations and enables you to grow your company with brand extensions without sacrificing integrity.
For example, Corksicle, a line of innovative barware, canteens and tumblers understand their target consumer and communicates with a strong visual identity of bold colors and creative packaging. Corksicle’s clearly defined brand identity appears in every touchstone of their business, from their logo and packaging to their website copy and social posts.
Your brand identity should include:
A cohesive visual language, featuring branding elements like your logo, colors and imagery
A consistent brand voice
A well-defined company mission, vision and value statement
Pro tip: Wix has a variety of business tools you can use to create a professional and impressive look for your brand and its visual assets.
02. Establish your online presence
Your website may be the first place where people encounter your brand, so make sure to create a website that allows visitors to experience your brand identity and form an accurate impression of your business right off the bat.
If you want your brand to be perceived as professional and straightforward, make sure your visitors' experience is too. For example, you might want to double check that there are no spelling errors or grammatical mistakes. If you want your brand to come across as more visually oriented than loquacious, substitute copy for big, high-resolution images that help show your message rather than tell it.
Pro tip: Take your online presence one step further and create an app that maintains your logo and branding and syncs with your Wix site and dashboard, all in real-time.
03. Actively ask for and respond to reviews
While you can actively shape your owned channels, like your blog and social media, your brand also has its own external online presence. People who feel passionately about your brand—good or bad—will find a public forum where they can share their thoughts. It’s clear that reviews on sites like Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor and Facebook play a huge part in shaping public perception, even in the minds of people who’ve never directly interacted with the brand being reviewed. If these platforms are relevant to your business, make sure to claim your brand’s profile and start collecting reviews.
You can maintain some control over this by creating a space for customers to leave reviews and add customer testimonials to your site. If you sell products on an eCommerce website, make sure there’s an area for customers to rate and review their purchases.
No matter where they appear, be sure to respond to all of your reviews as they roll in (with the exception of fake ones)—even the negative ones. If you address them quickly and honestly, many times you can turn a poor customer service experience around and retain their business. Not only that, it’ll show people reading the reviews that you care enough to listen and to resolve issues and complaints.
Further reading: The dead internet theory and the silent surge of bots
04. Listen to feedback
There are steps you can take to influence what people think about your brand. But keeping an eye on what people are actually saying about it is the key to great brand management. Start with adding a form builder to create custom feedback directly on your site. Whether you get beta testers for your products while you're building them, or you ask customers for feedback after they’ve used your product or bought something, the input is incredibly valuable.
As your company grows, there are a number of platforms and tools you can use to keep tabs on what people are saying about your brand.
Google Alerts, for example, allows you to set up as many alerts as you want and receive a notification by email whenever your keyword (in this case, brand name) shows up in Google. It’s wise to also set up alerts for common misspellings of the company name, popular product or service names or even key people in your company, like the CEO. You might also consider setting up Google alerts related to industry-specific news and trends, so you can stay on top of them and make your brand known for being ahead of the curve.
Social listening tools provide you with monitoring software that can analyze online comments or conversations about your brand. Platforms like Sprout Social, Hootsuite and BuzzSumo will give you those Superman-like listening powers. These tools enable you to gain insights on your customers, understand their pain points and learn from your competitors.
Other reputation management tools like Brand24, BrightLocal and Mention will expand your listening skills to other websites, blogs and newspapers, review sites and more. You can also use Wix Analytics to look inwards and make data-driven decisions like reviewing your site traffic or the behavior of visitors to your site.
To take the insights you’ve gleaned from your reputation management and social listening tools, here are some KPIs that will help you evaluate how to adjust your strategy going forward:
Sources: Who’s talking about you? What does that say about your audience? Have you reached the right people with your brand and messaging? What has them talking the most about your brand—and is it a good thing? Consider going directly to the source and see how others are responding. For example, if your Twitter feed suddenly gets a lot of attention, stay on top of what people are saying and carefully determine how you will participate, or not. For example, take a look at how the Disney+ TikTok account acknowledged the overpowering popularity of the Encanto movie soundtrack. One song in particular, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the earworm we’re all humming, fueled its own TikTok trend among parents teasing an interrupted workday or task. Disney+ took note and followed suit, posting their own TikTok with the caption, “Us welcoming the Encanto soundtrack into every corner of our lives.”
Also, are there opportunities you’re missing out on? If so, how do you build brand awareness and improve your reputation on other platforms?
Mentions over time: Is this information moving in an upward trend? Is it all over the place? Does it align with certain events or seasons? By identifying trends in how your mentions change over time, you can better prepare your company for when the influx of mentions and feedback come in. Or to empower your team to adjust your strategy so that your brand stays on the tip of everyone’s tongues more regularly—and positively. For example, PlayStation is one of the most followed brands on Twitter. With 24 million followers, the brand uses Twitter to engage with the gaming community and interact directly with gamers. This includes answering questions, giving purchase advice and highlighting new products. What makes PlayStation’s Twitter account so engaging is their posting frequency, use of high-quality graphics and media, effective hashtags and retweeting game profiles.
Sentiment: When your brand name and related searches are mentioned, what’s the overall attitude? Is it within a positive context? Is there a common emotional response people have to it? Is there a common reason why people mention your brand?
You can learn a lot about your brand’s perception based on the emotional weight of its mentions. Your reputation monitoring tool might also come with a word cloud to help you visualize this data.
Once you have the data, you can analyze your customers’ behaviors and sentiments to not only make sure your marketing campaigns and social media presence are being perceived the way you’d like, but strategically grow your business.
To illustrate, let’s look at Airbnb for an example. What started out as a vacation rental website has completely evolved into a multifaceted business model that now revolves around experiences. The company listened to their community and reshaped their brand identity based on the needs of their customers.
Airbnb made this change holistically, paying attention to every detail of their branding efforts. Starting with their logo redesign, the brand is embodied by the Bélo, a symbol of their shared values, as they put it, “it’s a symbol that, like us, can belong wherever it happens to be.” Their clearly defined core brand values are deeply rooted in community and belonging. The brand uses its marketing channels to boost brand awareness and to solidify its reputation as an experience provider. They also don’t use social media to promote discounts and other special offers. Instead, they offer more experiential content, introducing followers to its hosts and their properties, talking up the activities they can do while there.
Furthermore, Airbnb is consistent which only strengthens their reputation, and makes them a trustworthy business that continues to thrive on a global scale.
05. Improve the customer experience
According to data from Microsoft, 58% of customers who feel like their experience falls short with a brand will sever their relationship with them. But it’s not just the lost business you should concern yourself with.
Customers who’ve had a poor experience are much more likely to leave a public-facing review for a company than those who’ve had a good one. While potential and existing customers might not go searching for your employees’ reviews, they’re definitely going to seek out information on other customers’ experiences.
A recent survey from ReviewTrackers found that 35% of consumers only consider doing business with brands that have an average star rating of 4 or higher, while 10% go straight for 5-star companies:
Perhaps an even more powerful statistic from that survey is this: “94% of consumers say a bad review has convinced them to avoid a business.”
Remember, all it takes is just one other person to have a poor experience with a company for others to decide they don’t want to do business with them. So, be prepared to manage your brand reputation before others do it for you.
You can improve your customers’ experience—online, over the phone, on social channels and in person. And have a conflict resolution process in place, so you can try and resolve any dissatisfaction or negative feelings when a poor experience arises.
Pro tip: It’s helpful to always be transparent about other customers’ experiences. Try to include user-generated content like product ratings, customer testimonials, customer success stories, shared posts and images of customers using your products, on your website and social media platforms.
06. Shape a great company culture
If you follow your brand reputation strategy, it’s likely your company will grow beyond a one-person side hustle. Now that you have a team of helpers, remember that good things happen when companies promote a healthy and positive internal environment. By giving your team members meaningful work and empowering them to take charge of their professional lives, they become more confident and productive collaborators instead of just individual contributors.
This can have a huge impact on your brand’s public reputation. One reason for this is the trickle-down effect. When employees feel more satisfied and fulfilled by their work, they take pride in what they do and, as a result, do better work.
Even if your team isn’t totally customer-facing, the work they do will eventually get in front of your customers. Your social media writers, product designers and administrative team are responsible for making decisions and doing work that effectively shapes what your brand looks like to the public. So, you need all of it to be top-notch.
Another reason why companies need to foster positive company culture is because it impacts internal brand reputation. Remember, it doesn’t take long for an internal brand reputation to be shared outward, especially on social media. Sites like Glassdoor or Indeed provide a glimpse of a company’s culture to prospective employees. The better your employees feel supported and proud of their work, the more positive influence it can have on your overall brand reputation.
07. Create a brand style guide
People will start to form an opinion about your brand from the very first moment they encounter it—whether it’s when they enter your website for the first time, walk by your storefront, or see your Facebook ads. Their perception of your brand can change at any point throughout their relationship, too.
As your company grows, ensure that your brand projects the same identity and message at all times and across all channels with internal documentation. Creating a brand style guide ensures that everyone on your team remains consistent when it comes to design choices, communication strategies, quality of customer service and so on.
If you need a little inspiration, check out our list of brand style guide examples for companies that have both strong identities and powerful reputations.
08. Have a public relations team and/or process
Ultimately, as your brand grows, it’s likely you’re going to want to hire a person or team that actively pursues opportunities to get your business positive headlines. For example, they might:
Manage website and internal announcements related to awards and other accolades
Submit press releases to a distribution platform like Newswire
Contact local newspapers about major company developments
Secure speaking engagements for your leaders at industry conferences
By proactively putting your brand’s good name out there, a public relations representative can lay the foundation for public perception.
You can also stay ahead of potential issues or mishaps. Just look how Wix handled an unfortunate naming mishap. When a pandemic sounds like your product, changes are inevitable. Wix took this blunder in stride, using humor and feedback from the developer community across social channels to rebrand into Velo.
This is a lesson that every business, big or small, should keep in mind when debating the merits of a PR team. You can’t predict future events, but having a process ready to help you stay prepared for any challenge is truly invaluable.
What does brand reputation involve?
Brand reputation is the overall perception that the public has of a company or brand. It's shaped by a variety of factors, including the company's products or services, customer service, marketing and social media presence. A good brand reputation can lead to increased sales, customer loyalty and investor confidence. A bad brand reputation can lead to lost sales, customer churn and damage to the company's image.
Here are some of the key factors that contribute to brand reputation:
Product or service quality: The quality of a company's products or services is one of the most important factors that contribute to its brand reputation. If customers are satisfied with the quality of the products or services they purchase, they're more likely to have a positive perception of the company.
Customer service: The quality of a company's customer service is also important for brand reputation. If customers have positive experiences with customer service, they're more likely to recommend the company to others.
Marketing: A company's marketing can also influence its brand reputation. If a company's marketing is consistent with its brand values and resonates with its target audience, it can help to create a positive perception of the company.
Social media presence: A company's social media presence can also play a role in brand reputation. If a company is active on social media and responds to customer inquiries in a timely and professional manner, it can help to build trust with its customers.
Brand reputation FAQ
What makes a good brand reputation?
A good brand reputation is one that is positive, trustworthy and respected. It's built on a foundation of positive customer experiences, consistent brand messaging and a commitment to ethical business practices.