Managing your firm’s reputation is an essential part of doing business and several key factors need to be considered as part of this process. One of these factors will involve building a reputation, monitoring your reputation, and repairing your reputation. Each of these are individual yet integrated processes and this article will highlight how these items work together and what steps are commonly taken to manage these processes. For the most professional approach online reputation services check out Bright Past.

Building Your Reputation

When a company is new to the marketplace they will typically not have a strong brand reputation and will need to work on developing one. There are numerous ways that companies try to do this. One of the major ways that a company tries to build their brand reputation is actually the best way; by providing their customers with high quality service and products and by treating their customers properly. This will lead to positive feedback and word of mouth reviews that can help the company to develop its brand reputation positively. Beyond that, company’s build word of mouth by trying to become thought of as leaders in the industry. Most of the methods associated with succeeding in this manner are industry specific. As an example, a clothing manufacturer might benefit from signing on a celebrity to wear their clothes that will help to build up their reputation and make others head to that brand. This may not make sense for an accounting or legal firm who build their reputation based on their knowledge base. Many companies like these will build up their brand reputation by developing thought pieces and contributing to trade publications in which they are accepted as industry thought leaders. The point of this is to emphasize that a brand reputation is developed on an industry by industry basis and requires thought by management to develop how customers will view your business in comparison to your competition.

Monitoring your reputation

There are various ways that companies will use to monitor their reputation. Some will hire third parties to conduct surveys for potential and existing customers to rank their business in comparison to their competitors. These surveys can be instructive and provide insight into what customers may be thinking but are afraid of saying directly to you. However there may be a degree of survey error that is inherent in each survey which can lead to misinformation being provided to a company that doesn’t solve the source of the problem. As an example of this issue consider the case of McDonalds who asked for help in solving their problem of stagnant sales. The surveys came back saying that McDonald’s should offer healthier food options and various low calorie items were added to the menu. The problem was that people simply didn’t buy these healthy food items; they only thought they would. Survey error is a real phenomenon and a survey may not effectively capture your business reputation.

A simple way to monitor your reputation is to perform the occasional search on your business and determine how people think and perceive it. Read the reviews of your company and products and consider whether or not you would consider using a company that is perceived this way. Set a metric for measuring what you find and document it. Try undertaking steps to repair your brand reputation and from there you can reassess and continually monitor your brand reputation to understand the impact that your actions had on your reputation.

Repairing your brand reputation

There are numerous steps that a company can take to repair your reputation but first you will need to gather what is wrong with your reputation. Perform a full assessment of your business and see what went wrong so you can more thoroughly solve the challenges that your business is facing. From there you can troubleshoot to find the actions that you can undertake to repair your business and begin to generate a stronger reputation.

The reputation of your business is a dynamic thing and requires continual stages of creation, monitoring and repair at all times. When you think of it as a living breathing thing your brand reputation will seem to be clearer and more manageable over time.