Brand vs. reputation management: managing an intangible asset

By Gadook

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Communication World, by Reputation Management Authors Alison Rankin Frost, Chris Cooke

The way organisations manage their interactions with stakeholders will determine the strength of their brand and reputation. Organisations must be able to live up to their promises and deliver a consistent service to all stakeholder groups.

A number of trends affect the way organisations manage both their brands and reputations.

Market factors: Globalisation of markets makes them increasingly homogeneous and has encouraged organisations to restructure in response. Customers are more knowledgeable and have greater access to information. They have higher expectations based on past promises from organisations competing for their patronage. Traditional brand values, such as quality and safety, have become factors. Organisations also are finding it increasingly difficult to establish a difference in physical products.

Work-place factors: Technological advances have made organisations increasingly transparent. It is easier for customers and other stakeholders to get information on companies, products and services. As this has happened the boundaries between audience groups have broken down, making it impossible to segregate audiences and target them with separate messages. Employees are becoming more questioning and are less likely simply to take an instruction and get on with it.

Organisational responsibilities: As society puts increasing importance on business ethics, organisations need to reconsider their brand values. Having the cheapest or highest quality products is no longer the only thing that wins customers – “corporate citizenship” is now the buzz phrase.

For these reasons, more and more organisations are recognising the link between corporate reputation and competitive advantage. A strong corporate reputation can attract and retain the best stakeholders – whether they be consumers, investors or employees. It can attract customers, ensure a licence to trade and, in times of crisis, win “the benefit of the doubt.” A sound corporate reputation allows an organisation to achieve its business objectives better.

This recognition has led to the growth of a new discipline – reputation management. Often, but not always, contained within a corporate communication function, reputation management is about building a sound reputation and keeping it strong.

But what exactly is “corporate reputation,” and how do you manage such an intangible asset? And how does “corporate reputation” relate to “corporate brand” – something that many marketing departments have been managing for years?

Brand vs. Reputation

Generally, marketing people tend to talk about “brand” and “brand management,” and communication people tend to talk about “reputation” and “reputation management.” Brand management is principally concerned with the consumer and uses marketing techniques. The management of reputation is concerned with other audiences and uses corporate communication (or PR) techniques.

Our research found many similarities in managing corporate brand and corporate reputation. Some gaps and overlaps, however, were reducing the effectiveness of the work of the marketing function as well as the communication functions.

From the results of this research, we have developed a model for the effective management of corporate brand and reputation.

Defining Corporate Reputation and Brand

Some define corporate reputation as “corporate identity” – the image conjured up by the mention of a company’s name. It can be positive or negative, strong or weak.

Others define corporate reputation as the collective opinion of stakeholders toward an organisation based on its past record. In this case a good reputation is “awarded” to organisations who are seen by stakeholders to be fulfilling their own definition of “good corporate behaviour” or with whom they have had positive experiences in the past.

Branding is a process for distinguishing one product from another (brand positioning) and the features that enable stakeholders to choose one product over another (brand personality), At a corporate level, features that enable a customer (or employee or investor) to choose one organisation over another include a wide range of factors, from product value and quality to financial security, customer care and an organisation’s ethics record.

But the brand is more complex than just the features an organisation chooses to distinguish it from its competitors. Tim Ambler in his article “Are Branding and Marketing Synonymous?” describes brand as “the collective term for all the accumulation for the future once the immediate impact of transaction has been deducted.” Ambler recognised that a company’s brand is not made up of just the promises an organisation makes to the stakeholder; the stakeholder’s past experience of the organisation affects it. Therefore, an organisation’s brand equity is its unique added value plus or minus the “impact of transaction.”

The two definitions of both brand and reputation can be seen as two aspects of the same thing.

First, brand and reputation must identify features that will make stakeholders view the organisation more positively, and then successfully communicate to those stakeholder groups that those positive features exist.

Published by Gadook in Brand vs. reputation management, Reputation Management