The effects of positive brand reputation

Positive brand reputation is a collective effort carried out by a company in order to build customer loyalty to its products and services and increase customer confidence in the brand. Such actions eventually aim to drive a company's sales and growth. Brand loyalty and positive reputation result from good brand reputation management.

What is the importance of a positive brand reputation?

Every business features certain brands, as in products or services, aimed at a target audience. Maintaining a positive brand image and good reputation is a key component in its success, as a company's brand reputation plays a key role in every stage of the brand awareness funnel as well as in customer loyalty for increased customer retention.

From the introduction stage of brand awareness, through the interest, decision, and action by customers, the company takes reputation-building measures in order to establish brand identity, hoping that customers perceive the brand in a positive manner. Positive brand perception helps a product or a service through each of the funnel's stages as customers perceive what they purchased and evaluate its attributes.

The strategies to achieve a positive brand reputation

The importance of brand reputation manifests itself in a company's actions to boost the brand image. Corporate strategy is carried out via various efforts that can be divided into reactive and proactive moves, all aimed at achieving and maintaining a positive brand reputation.

When reacting to customers, companies must maintain a professional attitude and try to create a memorable experience for their clients. Guidelines must also be set for conflict management, in case product problems create customers' dissatisfaction. A company must deal with negative reviews and criticism which may bring about negative sentiment.

Proactively, companies must build a solid offline and online presence through various platforms and channels in order to engage with their community. Key platforms and actions companies must attend to and act upon are:

1. PR

Companies must create a strong public relations program that will position them as leaders in their market and experts in their field. Articles and items in newspapers, trade publications, and blogs, to name a few outlets, may bring good publicity and advance the brand value. A good public relations program can increase brand perception and decrease negative mentions.

2. Creating a compelling content marketing

Marketing materials must include compelling content in order to attract new customers, maintain current customers and constantly improve the brand's image. The company's website content, its blog, and landing pages, for example, serve an important role in raising awareness of the company's brands and by showing the benefits of the products. Such content may establish the company's position as a leading industry source on issues and topics their audience is looking for which may lead to keeping the brand's good image, bringing more website visitors and more potential customers.

3. SEO

Search engine optimization refers to a company's process to improve the quality and quantity of its website traffic to its website or page traffic from search engines. Good search engine results will increase traffic as more people become aware of the company's brand, hopefully on their way to becoming customers.

4. Website development

Developing and running a strong website with a great user experience can assist the brand reputation management efforts. A good design with a nice "look and feel"', fairly easy navigation through its website pages and great content as well may serve the company in improving brand loyalty, as customers will find all the information neatly in one place. Good website development will increase customer engagement and reduce site abandonment.

5. Social media & review sites

Online forums, social networks, and review sites are important places for any company to promote and sell its brands. Online reputation is the ability to both create great content as well as reply to customers who write and give feedback on the company's products. Online reviews can show the company what customers think about its brands and as a result, maintain the positive aspects and improve on the negative ones.

The effects of positive brand reputation

Positive brand reputation may lead to the following results:

• Improved sales, revenues, and profits: the ultimate goal of every company is to see its brand reputation efforts translate into more revenue.

• Customer retention: brand loyalty maintains customers. If customers' experience worsens, with regards to the company's brand, they may churn. Customer relationships are on the line here, as companies will use their brand reputation efforts to maintain as many of them as possible.

• Lead your market: positive brand reputation contributes to a company's market share. Maintaining quality products and good brands enables a company to lead in its market and industry.

How to use Affogata’s platform and achieve a positive brand reputation

Affogata's Product Enablement platform helps companies achieve a positive brand reputation in a number of ways. The platform measures consumer behavior through customers' comments and feedback in real-time and from millions of open-web data points. Analysis of such data enables the companies to do the following:

• Know and analyze brand reputation status by evaluating what their customers are thinking about them. The platform's data updates constantly and companies can track and monitor customer feedback around-the-clock and learn how their reputation improves or suffers, and then make the necessary changes to adjust themselves accordingly.

• Enhance the positive and track their weak spots. The platform gathers and highlights the positive sentiments as well as the negative mentions and then presents them according to volume and importance. The analysis also suggests where the company should focus and recommends possible required actions.

• Examine the effectiveness of your brand reputation moves: since tracking happens constantly, the platform is able to point at peak times of online conversations and feedback, be it good or bad so that the company can study and analyze the effects of such customer intelligence.

• Analyze your brand reputation vs. your competitors: Affogata tracks customer feedback from competitors and their brands as well and then compares their brand sentiment status to the company. Other brands' analysis can take place with regards to specific events or trending items of the competition so that the company never loses sight of what its rivals are doing and can stay ahead of them.

• Prevent brand reputation crisis: crisis points can be tracked via customer feedback as well, and they sometimes occur even before any of the other company's product and/or customer touchpoints may locate them and sound the alarm. Once tracked and reported by Affogata, the company can immediately start to physically fix the problems as well as operate damage control with its customers.