reputation & brand management

Your reputation is a factor of what you say, what you do and what people say about you. Your brand is a factor of how people feel about your organisation.

You can manage, nurture and develop your reputation and you can use your reputation to do what you want to do, whether you want to make a load of money or change the world (or both).

You can also manage, nurture and develop your brand. A strong brand leads to a strong reputation and vice versa.

You can’t separate your brand or your reputation from your core business. Your reputation is being built or destroyed by your customers, your staff, volunteers, directors, suppliers, competitors and stakeholders right now. And your ability to achieve your goals is entirely contingent on your reputation amongst the people you work for and with.

Your brand is also being created and modified by these relationships. You are only in control of part of the brand. You can control the values of the organisation and the corporate identity but you can’t control how people feel about your organisation, you can only listen to them and respond.

Effective reputation and brand management is part of business planning and development and it takes someone with a very particular set of skills and experience to get it right. You need someone with experience of running organisations, managing frontline staff, working with customers, analysing data, developing and implementing strategy, driving creativity and influencing senior decision makers.

If you have someone like that in your organisation: make them your comms director.

If you don’t: call me.