Increase Business Potential: Branding and Reputation Management
Whether your company is small or large, branding is important to make your business a success. Branding allows your customers to recognize your products via a name or logo. Think of the brand name “Nike.” When you see Nike’s logo, which is just a logo with no text, you immediately connect that image with the product: Nike sneakers.
When you start your business, invest the time in choosing and making the logo or saying to represent it carefully as it will be with you forever. Make sure it is something that people can identify easily with your products. Once you get your name, logo or saying out in the world, people will start to associate it with your business.
This can lead to bad or good things. Once you start branding, you must have excellent customer service, or your brand will be known as for bad service or products. This is brand reputation, and it must be managed properly.
Set up a brand management policy for your employees to follow. Reputation is based on how you deal with people, what you do when you or your employees make a mistake, how you react to customer comments, and how you interact with customers and the general public. Remember, the general public is anyone who could become a customer.
Basics and Advantages of Branding
Create a name that people can learn to trust. A trusted name brings loyalty, which means repeat customers. Repeat customers and new customers that try your brand because of the referral from a satisfied customer mean more profits for your brand. Branding is an important part of marketing your services and products. Treat the brand well, make sure your employees have great work standards and high morals, make sure your products and services are top-notch, and your brand will work for you.
- Branding Basics: What It Is, How It Works and Benefits
- Looking at the Advantages and Disadvantages of Co-Branding Strategy
- 10 Best Practices for Branding
- Looking at the Benefits of TQM
Branding Importance
It is important to brand your business so that the business succeeds. Most businesses take a loss in the first three years of existence,
but you can wipe out that statistic with proper branding and with excellent treatment of the brand. Word of mouth advertising is the most important advertising, and branding will support your word of mouth advertising.
Your brand is your idea. If you design a brand name or logo, contact a trademark attorney to have the name trademarked. If you don’t take this important precaution, someone may try to steal your brand, and if that happens, that person or company can ruin your good reputation.
- The Importance of Branding
- Tips on Choosing Your Business Name
- 5 Great Market Research Tools
- Tips for Creating a Company Slogan
- Samples and Tips: Create a Catchy Business Slogan
Creating a Brand Strategy
When you create a brand strategy, you must use the appropriate resources, and you must use those resources in the proper manner. Social networking is an excellent way to market your brand, but be sure you have a separate social networking account for you personal identity and your brand. Even still, you must be careful of what you say on your personal accounts as people will connect the two facets of your identity.
Be sure to pick a name that is easy to remember. Business names that contain one to three words are easier to remember than a longer, more complicated business name. A shorter name is also better for a website name; your web name should be the same as your business name, if at all possible, to strength and to promote your overall branding strategy.
- Emerging Markets: Best Branding Strategies
- Free Ideas for Naming a Business
- 10 Tips for Designing a Professional Business Card
- Track Trends and Market Your Business With Twitter Hashtags
- Put a Brand on Your Company Using These Strategies
- Marketing Your Business Through Social Media Websites
- Pros and Cons of Advertising on Facebook
- Managing Brand Reputation on the Internet
- Helpful Guide to Advertising Options for Small Businesses
Understanding and Creating Reputation Management
Reputation management ties right in with the branding strategy. You must be careful of what you say online because even if you delete something you wish you hadn’t said, it may eventually come back to haunt you.
Be sure to keep all your communications professional. If you make a mistake, apologize promptly. People will talk about you and your brand to others. If someone is unhappy with something that you did (or they perceive that you did), that person may tell other people of his or her bad experience, and this could seriously impact your brand and your reputation. Likewise, if you make your customers happy, they will tell their friends how great your product and services are, thus strengthening your reputation.
Part of reputation management is pricing. Keeping your prices the same across the board also encourages customers especially if your prices are competitive. Do not give one customer a certain price, and then offer another customer a different price; remember that the second customer may be a referral from the first customer.
- Explaining the Reputation Management Process
- Put Together a Policy to Save Your Business Reputation from Internet Gossip
- Great Real-Life Examples of Successful Crisis Management
- Examples of the Five C’s of Product Pricing
- Sales Promotion for Influencing Customer Minds
- The Onion Model and Crisis Management
Working With Clients
Sometimes you may just have to say no to a client. Before you do that, you need to assess the situation. Will losing the client hurt your
business? Are the client’s demands outrageous? Does the client understand how your business works? Before you say “No” to a client because the client can’t make up his or her mind or is an overbearing and demanding client, make sure he or she understands your business practices and procedures.
If you get negative feedback from a client, process the feedback. Is the client’s feedback something you can use to better your business brand and enhance reputation management? What could you do differently in the future? Here’s some ways of dealing with those types of customers and fine tuning your customer service efforts:
- Dealing with Demanding Clients
- 10 Strategies for Dealing with Negative Feedback
- Upgrading Customer Service and Sales With Negotiation Role Play
Share Your Thoughts
Customer feedback is important. It helps businesses to analyze their marketing and branding efforts, to find out where they may have missed the mark in providing a satisfying customer experience, and to make changes to get back on track. With that in mind…we want to hear from you! Let us know how helpful this collection of articles was to you and what other type of information you would like to have.
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References
- Photo: Nike Logo by J_Makk under CC BY SA 2.0
- Author’s own experience and information from links contained in article.
- Photo: Customer Care by Mitch Fuqua under Public Domain
- Photo: Branding on Sign by Pacific Coast Highway under CC BY 3.0