Measuring Reputation
QUICK FACTS.
Measuring brand reputation is a complex process that involves evaluating various aspects of an organisation's image and perception among its target audience and stakeholders. While there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach, here are some commonly used methods and indicators to measure brand reputation:
1. Surveys and Interviews: Conducting surveys and interviews among customers, employees, partners, and other stakeholders to gather their perceptions, opinions, and feedback about the brand. Questions can cover areas like brand recognition, trust, satisfaction, and overall reputation.
2. Social Media Monitoring: Monitoring social media platforms, online forums, and review sites to track mentions, sentiment, and conversations related to the brand. This can provide insights into how people perceive and discuss the organization, its products, and services.
3. Media Analysis: Monitoring media coverage, including news articles, press releases, and online publications, to assess the tone, reach, and frequency of brand mentions. Positive or negative media coverage can influence brand reputation.
4. Online Analytics: Analysing website traffic, search engine rankings, social media engagement, and other online metrics to gauge the brand's visibility, popularity, and customer interaction. This data can indicate the level of interest and engagement with the brand.
5. Brand Tracking Studies: Conducting periodic brand tracking studies that measure key brand attributes, such as brand awareness, brand associations, brand loyalty, and brand equity. These studies help identify trends and changes in brand perception over time.
6. Net Promoter Score (NPS): Using the NPS survey methodology to measure customer loyalty and likelihood of recommending the brand to others. A higher NPS score typically indicates a stronger brand reputation.
7. Employee Surveys: Gathering feedback from employees to assess their perception of the brand, internal communication, and overall satisfaction. Engaged and motivated employees often contribute to a positive brand reputation.
8. Stakeholder Feedback: Engaging with key stakeholders, such as investors, partners, and suppliers, to understand their perception of the brand and the organisation's reputation within the industry or market.
9. Competitor Analysis: Comparing the brand's reputation with that of its competitors through benchmarking studies. This helps identify areas of strength and weakness in relation to competitors and highlights opportunities for improvement.
10. Crisis Management: Evaluating how the brand's reputation withstands and recovers from a crisis or negative event. Monitoring public sentiment and conducting post-crisis assessments can provide insights into the impact on brand reputation.
It's important to note that measuring brand reputation is an ongoing process, and organisations often employ a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to gain a comprehensive understanding of how their brand is perceived. Additionally, organisations may tailor their measurement approach based on their industry, target audience, and specific brand objectives.
Brand awareness, image, trust and reputation, are all painstakingly built up over the years.
Brand reputation is how the public views your brand based on their personal direct or indirect experience with the brand and are stored in the memories customers and core target markets, so they exert a lasting influence. Because of this, they can be seen as an asset from an accounting point of view: their economic effects extend far beyond the mere consumption of the product or service.
The reputation of the brand is a source of demand and lasting attractiveness, the image of superior quality and added value justifies a premium price. A dominant brand is an entry barrier to competitors because it acts as a reference in its category.
LONG FORM.
Brand reputation is created by familiarity (I know it well, I use it a lot) and by brand perceived uniqueness (this brand is unique, is different, there is no substitute).
There is no universal reputation scoring card however reputation is based on six factors or ‘pillars’ (Fombrun, Gardberg and Sever, 2000):
Emotional appeal (trust, admiration and respect);
Products and services (quality, innovativeness, value for money and so on);
Vision and leadership;
Workplace quality (well-managed, appealing workplace; employee talent);
Financial performance;
Social responsibility.
Measuring brand reputation can be a complex process that involves a variety of different metrics and techniques. Here are some steps that can be taken to measure brand reputation:
Define the key attributes of your brand: The first step is to clearly define the key attributes of your brand that you want to measure. This might include things like brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand trust, and brand perception.
Conduct a survey: Surveys can be an effective way to measure brand reputation. You can use online survey tools to reach a large number of people and ask them questions about your brand. This might include questions about how they perceive your brand, whether they trust your brand, and how likely they are to recommend your brand to others.
Monitor social media: Social media is a valuable tool for monitoring brand reputation. You can use social listening tools to track mentions of your brand on social media and see what people are saying about your brand. This can give you insight into how your brand is perceived and help you identify areas where you may need to improve.
Track media coverage: Tracking media coverage can also be an effective way to measure brand reputation. You can use media monitoring tools to track mentions of your brand in the news and see how your brand is being portrayed in the media.
Conduct focus groups: Focus groups can be a valuable way to get more in-depth feedback about your brand. You can bring together a group of people who are representative of your target audience and ask them questions about your brand. This can give you insight into how your brand is perceived and help you identify areas where you may need to improve.
The reputation can and should be tightly controlled and managed. The best partners to actively manage an organisations brand reputation is us - Musubi. Here is why:
Understand that successful brand management is a complex task.
It requires skills not normally associated with the traditional marketing function. The ability to brief market research companies, advertising agencies and designers, to liaise with the sales and distribution people and to survive the odd skirmish with the “bean counters” is no longer enough. Brand managers certainly need to be adept in all these areas, but they also need to understand how a brand can be managed for the benefit of shareholders. This requires an understanding of how, in financial terms, a brand contributes to the success of a business and the creation of shareholder value. Managers of services brands need to become adept at internal communication and training, to ensure that customer satisfaction is delivered consistently in support of their brand’s promise. And if the brand is the corporation, the brand manager needs to understand not just the subtle art of corporate communications but the infinitely more demanding role of stakeholder accountability.
Strategic brand management.
Recognition of the economic value of brands has increased the demand for effective management of the brand asset. In the pursuit of increasing shareholder value, companies are keen to establish procedures for the management of brands that are aligned with those for other business assets, as well as for the company as a whole. As traditional purely research-based measurements proved insufficient for understanding and managing the economic value of brands, companies have adopted brand valuation as a brand management tool. Brand valuation helps them establish value-based systems for brand management.
Reputation and Financial Performance.
Economic value creation becomes the focus of brand management and all brand related investment decisions. Companies as diverse as American Express, IBM, Samsung Electronics, Accenture, QANTAS, bp, Tesla, and Fujitsu have used brand valuation to help them refocus their businesses on their brands and to create an economic rationale for branding decisions and investments. Many companies have made brand value creation part of the remuneration criteria for senior marketing executives. These companies find brand valuation helpful for the following:
Making decisions on business investments. By making the brand asset comparable to other intangible and tangible company assets, resource allocation between the different asset types can follow the same economic criteria and rationale, for example, capital allocation and return requirements.
Measuring the return on brand investments based on brand value to arrive at an roi that can be directly compared with other investments. Brand management and marketing service providers can be measured against clearly identified performance targets related to the value of the brand asset.
Making decisions on brand investments. By prioritising them by brand, customer segment, geographic market, product or service, distribution channel, and so on, brand investments can be assessed for cost and impact and judged on which will produce the highest returns.
Making decisions on licensing the brand to subsidiary companies. Under a licence the subsidiaries will be accountable for the brand’s management and use, and an asset that has to be paid for will be managed more rigorously than one that is free.
Taking up a position: the brand platform.
The underlying aim of a brand position should be to enable it to survive and thrive forever, regardless of how competitive dynamics and business needs evolve over time. The challenge, therefore, is to identify a core idea that frames an ambition or aspiration for the brand that will be relevant to target audiences over time. Focusing on an inherent human need or desire is the way to do this.
The marketplaces in which brands exist are evolving faster than ever before. The speed of innovation has increased competitors’ ability to imitate one another, and the proliferation of media vehicles makes longlasting differentiation on basic product grounds increasingly difficult.
Articulating a core idea as a longer-term ambition or aspiration is the essence of developing a brand strategy that will last for more than 3–5 years. Vision, mission and values are the terms most often used to define the central building blocks for the brand, and they form the “brand platform”. The vision gives the brand a reason for being; the mission provides it with specific strategic objectives to accomplish; and values underpin all actions taken concerning the brand and the perception of it among different stakeholders. Overall, the brand platform is designed to:
impart a common understanding of the brand throughout an organisation;
influence behaviours that shape stakeholder perceptions over time;
serve as the creative brief for visual and verbal identity development, as well as communications in the round.
The linkage with performance and reputation.
High-performance organisations link their reputation measures to a brand roadmap. The roadmaps provides visibility on the role brand messaging, touchpoints, and staff play and then ascertain what level of positive or negative reputation could result. The roadmap helps:
Focus – a few key measures of success are clearly understood.
Unity of purpose – a “one company” mentality with everyone pulling together.
Energy – a sense of urgency, often emanating from the desire to fulfil a customer need.
Agility – an ability to adapt to a changing business environment.
Learning –a desire to share knowledge and the organisational infrastructure to enable knowledge to be shared.
Identity – an individual and collective identification with an organisation’s mission, values, business strategy and brand promise.
If all the above characteristics are fostered, high standards of performance can be sustained even in the face of fierce competition.
High-reputation organisations have a robust internal driver of reputation. The culture helps build the brand from within.
The below set of drivers are given different weighting and priorities in different industries. But it is fair to say that when they work in concert with each other their combined strength dilutes areas of weakness. These drivers help put pressure on management to perform to higher ethical standards and to think about the role of management’s reputation and credibility, and commitment to human assets and community relationships. A brand that is consistently perceived as representing high standards of quality and integrity is a strong and valuable brand.
Align employees around:
open shared innovativeness;
celebrating diversity of culture and backgrounds
behaviours that improve team performance
Creating a collective winning culture
value as a long-term investment;
soundness of financial position;
wise use of corporate assets;
ability to attract, develop and keep talented people;
responsibility to the community and/or environment.
A brand can embody all of the above if there is a conscious choice to broaden its meaning beyond product benefits in order to connect with stakeholders in a holistic way. Musubi Brand Agency can help make that connection though a wide range of activities and workshops.
So here are our 5 principles:
Reputation and trust:
We need a common understanding and language for all our people to describe the relationship between reputation, trust and brand as the basis for co-ordinated, accountable programs that the whole organisation can get behind.
Reputation promotion and protection:
We must get the balance right between reputational promotion and protection, and link the two coherently across the organisation.
Reputation and risk:
Robust and early intervention issues management processes need to be a central part of our risk management. Reputational challenge happens when performance fails to align with stakeholder expectations.
Communications and behaviours:
We must align our communications (what we say) and our behaviours (what we do every day) across the whole organisation, backed by clear internal communication and management accountability.
Musubi brand agency plays a crucial role in the success of a business in commercial terms. Here are a few reasons why:
Brand Identity: A brand agency helps a business develop and maintain a strong brand identity. This includes creating a logo, defining the brand's mission and values, and establishing a consistent brand voice and visual identity. A strong brand identity can help a business stand out in a crowded market and build a loyal customer base.
Competitive Advantage: A well-crafted brand identity can give a business a competitive advantage. Consumers are more likely to choose a brand that they recognise and trust, and a strong brand can help a business differentiate itself from its competitors.
Increased Sales: A strong brand can lead to increased sales. Consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that they trust and feel a connection to. A brand agency can help a business develop marketing strategies and campaigns that resonate with consumers and drive sales.
Brand Equity: A strong brand can increase a business's brand equity. Brand equity refers to the value that a brand adds to a product or service beyond its functional benefits. A business with strong brand equity can charge premium prices and create customer loyalty, which can lead to long-term revenue growth.
Brand Extension: A strong brand can also enable a business to expand into new markets and product categories. A brand agency can help a business identify new opportunities for growth and develop strategies for brand extension.
Overall, Musubi brand agency is crucial for a business looking to establish a strong brand identity, build customer loyalty, and increase revenue and growth in the long term.
Take the first step towards a powerful brand transformation and contact us today to unlock your brand's true potential. Partner with us for unbiased expertise, fresh perspectives, and optimised resource utilisation. Elevate your reputation, mitigate risks, and make informed decisions to position your organisation correctly.