Understand Your Brand: It May Be Your Company’s Best Defense

Most people know that reputation management protects your brand. What you may not know is that a good, strong brand protects your reputation, too.

That’s why it’s so alarming that so many companies don’t take the time to understand their brand. They get their brand confused with their logo or their advertisements. Any branding that does take place happens largely by accident.

When a business doesn’t take the time to understand its brand they lose control of the brand. They hand that control over to the public, instead.

Letting the public decide who your brand is puts you into a position of weakness. First, the customers may decide to saddle you with an identity you don’t want. Second, a brand represents a promise. Once the public perceives your business as having an identity, your every activity is expected to support and nurture that identity. If it doesn’t, people feel as though you were lying to them, which can lead to a storm of negative criticism—the type that spreads like wildfire on the Internet.

It’s very, very hard to hold to promises if you don’t know for sure which promises you are marking. Which means, in the absence of a mindfully built and thoughtfully considered brand, you are likely to misstep and do something which runs against your brand as the general public perceives it.

The answer, then, is to be strategic about your brand. You have to consciously choose it. You have to articulate it. You have to build it.

Obviously some part of your brand will grow organically. A business can’t just choose to be something it isn’t. If you serve your native country’s authentic food without any apologies or attempts to bend over backwards for the customer then there’s no sense in deciding that you’re going to be “that warm, friendly food spot.” If your work product relies on being thorough and detail-oriented then you don’t want to decide that you’re “the guys who do it really fast.”

That means you’ll start by really examining your strengths, so that you can name those strengths and build your brand around those strengths.

Then, you’ll make sure that everything you do reflects that brand. You won’t launch any products or services that run counter to your brand. Your advertising messages will reflect your brand. Your blog posts will reflect your brand. Your tweets will reflect your brand. If you’re a start-up, then your logo design will need to reflect your brand too. After all, you don’t want a fuzzy teddy bear wearing a pink skirt representing your auto repair shop, right?

Consciously choosing to build your brand is also an opportunity for some soul-searching.

What have you been doing so far? Are you really building a business that you can be proud of? And if not, what would it take to make your business into something that you’re really proud of? Decide would it would take, and then roll these improvements into your branding efforts.

After all, you can build your brand and still lose your reputation. Staying congruent and on message is just one of the many ways to protect yourself.

Another way is simply to create the best company that you can by staying committed to excellence and integrity, every single day. My business partner Ryan Russo and myself have spent years developing a brand strategy for our company and knowing the in’s and out’s of our brand, we know that for our company really succeed we must have a world class brand.

Understand Your Brand: It May Be Your Company’s Best Defense