What’s in a brand? Managing your brand’s reputation

Following the success of our From the Experts webinar series, we wanted to provide you with this content through another channel to make it easily accessible and digestible for our audience.

Here you will find a summary of our latest webinar, “From the Experts: What’s in a Brand: Managing your Brand’s Reputation” with Kevin Mulrane, VP, Head of Sales, US at ProQuo AI.

What makes up people’s relationships with brands?

The first step for any brand, whether B2B or B2C, is to build a relationship with its consumers to understand the emotions associated with the brand and to segment those emotions into distinct groups and categories. Understanding the various factors derived from feelings enables you to make more informed marketing decisions, ultimately driving commercial success.

Kevin Mulrane, VP, Head of Sales, US at Proquo AI, says, “There are over 25 million decisions a marketer can make that drive a brand forward. With so many things to consider, how do you know what’s right for the brand to move forward? Putting all of these correlating factors together of how people feel about your brand, what you do well, what you don’t do well, and how you take action to improve it means wiser decision-making and more thoughtful efforts.”

Many of these decisions are based on hope, intuition, and intent vs. impact. Brands put together campaigns or make certain marketing decisions with the intention of achieving a specific result, and sometimes, they just miss the mark. The actual impact often does not align with the intended outcome. Being able to really understand how people feel and the relationship they have with your brand allows you to be much more strategic and practical with your marketing actions. 

Flip the switch on your brand’s relationship

The early days of setting up your brand require testing. You might be looking more at what drives the category forward, and those things change drastically and vary from category to category. As the world evolves around us and consumer behaviors and thoughts change, it’s becoming increasingly crucial for brands to be transparent and empathetic so that they can provide what they need to their consumers. 

As Kevin says, “I think what’s really interesting about this is that it’s not just a ‘get a glimpse, operate, and move on.’ It needs to be this ‘always on’ approach of understanding how things are changing in the marketplace and then being able to proactively and quickly take those optimizations, those changes, so you don’t go too far down a rabbit hole to make a really bad lasting negative impression”.

Brands that draw on the emotion behind their vision and mission, such as supporting specific charities or donating to various causes, are attracting more and more people. Suppose you are on top of these efforts. In that case, you can proactively observe how consumer behavior is shifting and start making correlations on how that impacts customer loyalty, hiring, and growing your customer base, as well as understanding how the value of the brand directly affects the business’s commercial success.

The role of social media in your brand’s reputation

The impact of COVID-19 is not lost on any of us. While we are all feeling a sense of returning to normal, there are certainly lasting effects that it has had on businesses across all industries and verticals. With that, brands worldwide have been seeking new channels to convey their message. 

Leveraging mediums like social media, and more specifically, tactics like social selling, allows you to reinforce your brand and convey the message meaningfully. Colin Day, Managing Director EMEA & APAC here at Oktopost, says, “Statistically, the collective reach of a company’s employees is at least 10 times that of the brand itself when it comes to social media. So if you look at the collective reach of the brand over all of its social channels, its employees outrun it by 10%”.

Social media is a massive part of our lives these days. If we examine how often we’re connected to our mobile devices and check our social media feeds, it’s no wonder that they play such a significant role in our brand’s strategy. Harnessing the power of your employees to help enhance your brand and turn them into ambassadors allows you to enforce best practices, coach and educate them on what it means to be brand ambassadors and what it means to be responsible to the brand they are representing, and the brand equity you’ve taken so much careful thought into developing.

How and what B2B marketers can learn from B2C 

There is a significant emphasis on B2B organizations building relationships with their customers, as a sense of community or tribe is becoming increasingly prevalent. Revenue from new business can be directly associated with a former customer who left their previous company and started at a new one, and brought the technology they know and love with them.

As Kevin puts it, “It’s becoming a bigger and bigger opportunity for brands to really invest in customer loyalty, and it all starts with that relationship and understanding. What do my customers like? What do they deem important? It’s the understanding that building the relationship creates that snowball effect within your user base”. 

Ultimately, it’s all about being radically transparent. You can’t have transparency without every department and every individual working together for a common goal. Company-wide teamwork, rather than just working with your departments, will drive the organization to success and build better relationships with customers, prospects, and employees.