How to Manage Brand Reputation

The following is republished with the permission of the Association of National Advertisers. Find this and similar articles on ANA Newsstand.

By Chuck Kapelke

When Doug Zarkin assumed the role of VP and CMO at Pearle Vision, an eye care provider with more than 500 locations across North America, he set out to revamp the brand by tapping into the company’s roots as a high-touch, neighborhood business. “We recognized that the path forward needed to start with restoring the power of what our brand stood for,” Zarkin says. “Our purpose is to become the premier neighborhood destination that people trust with their eye care and eyewear needs.”

To monitor progress, Zarkin enlisted the services of Reputation.com, a Redwood City, Calif.‑based company that helps businesses boost their visibility on search engines, as well as analyze and respond to social media posts, online reviews, and other signals of brand reputation. “Our business is about 80 percent franchisees, and you are only as strong as your weakest location,” Zarkin says. “Our reputation management platform allows us to see in detail where we have done very well and where we have disappointed. Our operations and marketing teams are now able to pull the reputation score of each and every location that carries our name, allowing us to have meaningful dialogue with our doctors, and if necessary, support them in improving our quality-of-care perception.”

Reputation.com is an example of how the shift toward digital commerce has spawned remarkable new resources for companies seeking to grow and maintain their brand reputation. (See sidebar “Reading the Tea Leaves.”) By aggregating perceptions from a variety of sources, marketers can gain a detailed understanding of how their brand is perceived across demographic and geographic segments. Such tools can also help provide feedback on how a marketing effort is bolstering the brand, or what damage may have resulted from a recent scandal or public misstep.

“Reputation is not the type of thing that fluctuates a lot, but everything a company says and does will have an impact on their corporate brand,” says Jim Gregory, chairman of Tenet Partners, which manages the Core Brand Index, a quantitative research program that has been fielded since 1990 and measures brands based on surveys of impartial observers. “That impact can directly relate to financial performance, both on the revenue side and the stock side. People like to do business with companies that they know and respect. They like to buy their products and they like to invest in those companies whose reputations are strong. We know that for a fact, and we know you can manage reputation to a degree.”

The business case is strong: the Edelman Trust Barometer found that highly trusted companies — that is, those with a great reputation — have a 5 percent profit advantage over companies that are not trusted. Yet, while a majority of CEOs say reputation is important, most do not understand how to manage reputation or build trust with consumers and customers. ANA magazine spoke with marketers and other experts for insights into what it takes to monitor and manage brand reputation in today’s competitive landscape.

Own Brand Reputation — and Manage It

Ten years ago, the Domino’s Pizza brand was in the tank. “The stock was horrible, people didn’t like the pizza, it was really not doing well,” says D’Arcy O’Neill, a creative director at Crispin Porter Bogusky, the creative agency for Domino’s since 2007. “That was exciting for us because it was a great time to come in and challenge and disrupt things.”

Rather than place blame, the Domino’s brand team took ownership and in 2009 produced a now-famous video featuring the CEO admitting the company was falling short of its standards and promising to do better. “That core reset allows you to go forward,” O’Neill says. “We had to deliver on that and make great pizza. From there, it slowly started to pick up momentum.”

In the ensuing years, Domino’s has sprung back to life — the stock has surged from below $10 per share to more than $250 — yet the brand’s overseers do not rest on their laurels. When a writer at Esquire recently wrote an article comparing his over-dependence on Domino’s pizza app to a toxic relationship, “at least 10 people on our team saw it within an hour of it being posted,” O’Neill says. The agency sent a Domino’s delivery man to the reporter’s office with pizza and a boom box (a la the famous scene in the film Say Anything) to attempt to repair the relationship.

“We do everything we can to try to create those surprise and delight moments,” O’Neill says. “You can’t reply that way to every bad review, but as long as you’re trying, that’s really important.”

Key Takeaway: Demonstrate honesty and awareness of a brand’s reputation, and manage it by monitoring and responding quickly and creatively when things go awry. “It’s impossible for a brand to be perfect and not have any flaws or missteps here and there,” O’Neill says. “As long as people feel like you’re trying to the best of your ability to make things right, that action, plus speaking honestly, goes a long way with the modern consumer.

Build Resilience Through Brand Purpose

Every day, the market research firm Morning Consult conducts a survey of between 5,000-10,000 consumers to get their opinions on roughly 3,000 brands. The results are fed into the company’s Brand Intelligence platform, which allows brands to gauge where they stand on questions about community impact, favorability, purchasing intent, buzz, and other factors.

“A lot of people see it as a stock ticker for your brand,” says Jeff Cartwright, VP of content at Morning Consult. “It allows brands to look at not only how they’re performing but how they’re performing alongside their competitors, and we can deep-dive by different demographics. If you’re facing a brand scandal, we can tell you very quickly how it affects your reputation.”

Cartwright says brands with a compelling brand purpose tend to have more resilience in the face of scandals or bad news. For example, the stock ticker for Southwest shows no discernible dips related to past negative news, including the death of a passenger midflight. “That’s due to the goodwill people have with Southwest,” Cartwright says. “They have this great reputation, and this great brand purpose to make flying a great experience. They really commit to that purpose of being the airline you love to fly on.”

Key Takeaway: Building a strong brand reputation is a long-term effort, and companies that know what they stand for have a clear advantage in maintaining consumer trust. “Brands sometimes overthink their corporate social responsibility strategy,” Cartwright says. “Sometimes the simpler it is, the more effective it is. Some of the most simple tactics, like paying your employees well, delivering good products, or making goods in the country where you sell them, are the easiest things for making sure your brand reputation stays intact.”

Make Everyone Accountable

Building and sustaining a strong brand reputation requires an all-in effort from a company’s employees, particularly the front-liners who deal directly with customers. Marketers should work with other senior leaders to create awareness about the importance of the brand and help everyone understand the role they play, Tenet Partners’ Gregory says.

“Consistency is one thing that we see as a key component of maintaining a good reputation,” Gregory adds. “If you communicate clearly, concisely, and consistently over time, that really stands out as a fundamental in building your corporate brand.”

At ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, brand reputation is considered to be everyone’s job. “St. Jude exists as a service for children who are diagnosed with cancer and other life-threatening diseases,” says Emily Callahan, chief marketing and experience officer at ALSAC. “Everything we do from a marketing perspective is based on our reputation and our brand purpose, which is finding cures and saving children.”

ALSAC’s leaders have developed a proprietary brand scorecard to monitor their brand’s reputation within the nonprofit industry. “Everyone who works at ALSAC, from the receptionist to the CEO, is held accountable on their annual performance review for the net revenue that we raise, and for how everyone helped steward our overall brand reputation,” Callahan explains. “The entire enterprise gets a score, and we either achieve it all together, or we don’t achieve it all together, similar to our revenue goals. Then, on their performance reviews, people can elaborate on the things they do to contribute to the brand. Once people grasp that concept, it’s pretty powerful to see the ways that they become brand stewards and brand ambassadors, and they help us grow the brand with different audiences. How they answer the phone, how they treat a donor, how they act when they’re out in community, how they help fundraise — all of those go into the overall brand experience, so people understand the role they play in either enriching that or undermining that.”

Key Takeaway: In an era when every touchpoint can influence brand perception, marketers need to work across the organization — particularly with the chief operations officer — to help align everyone toward a common understanding of the brand. “Every single thing that you do now has a chance to be judged and judged publicly,” says Jason Grier, chief customer officer at Reputation.com. “If I walk into a restaurant and the door ding is too loud, I have an opportunity to comment on it. It’s the sum total of your entire experience. You have to pay attention to all aspects of your business.”

TRENDSPOTTING

Reading the Tea Leaves

• While managing yesterday’s crisis is an important dimension of brand reputation, marketers can also use newly emerging tools to keep an eye on the future and uncover trends or larger narratives that may affect their brand reputation down the road.
• Protagonist Technology, a San Francisco-based firm, provides a service called “narrative analytics,” which uses algorithm-driven analyses of millions of blog posts, Twitter feeds, media stories, and other textual sources to help identify the larger narratives, or core belief systems, that shape people’s opinions.
• “We’re about understanding how people use narratives to understand the world, whether that be a big social issue, or their perceptions of a company, product, brand, or the place they work for,” says Jeff Marshall, EVP of client solutions at Protagonist Technology.
• In 2016, the firm helped a client in the financial services industry identify an emerging narrative about Bitcoin becoming the “new gold,” which represented a potential threat to the company’s precious metals business. “We were able to tell them to pay attention to this low-signal narrative, and in 2017, Bitcoin became the major story around gold,” Marshall says. “We made them aware months in advance of their competitors, so they had time to prepare and respond to this argument and counteract that narrative, which has now died down, in part because our client refuted much of the argument.”
• Keeping an eye on the bigger picture can help marketers see emerging opportunities or threats to their brand reputation, whether those are shifting attitudes about nutrition, environmental responsibility, or other social issues.
• “Be aware of the narratives and how they are changing,” Marshall says. “Social media monitoring can give you some indicators, but it gives you no idea of why people are feeling the way they’re feeling. For that, you have to get to the mindset that they have, the logic behind their opinion or attitude that we call their narrative. As an actor in the narrative landscape yourself, you can be framing your communications and PR in the right way and start to be moving the conversation itself.”

— C.K.