Brand Reputation: Strategy, Definition and Tips [Guide for 2024]

At the beginning of 2024, Rockstar Games faced boiling rage from the gaming community. The company’s reputation was ruined by a series of court trials, unfair treatment of its employees, and the delay of the most expected game in the world— GTA VI. As a result, Rockstar Games’ Reputation Score fell to an alarming -47. It doesn’t bode well for the company’s future.

Brand reputation is the overall public perception and opinion of a brand shared by customers, stakeholders, and others who might have had contact with a particular brand. It informs how well a brand is recognized, trusted, and valued. Thus, such a reputation influences the brand’s success or failure.

Most people choose what to buy based on a brand’s reputation.

Surprised?

Studies, like one from Trustpilot, show that brand reputation is the top factor shoppers consider when choosing a product or service, even more important than the quality of the product or service.

In this article, I will explain the concept of brand reputation, how to build a good brand reputation, and some tips on how to make it work for your business.

Ready, steady, go!

Table of contents:

• What is brand reputation? Definition
• How can you quickly check your brand reputation?
• Why is brand reputation important?
• Brand reputation strategy:
  • Step 1: Examine your current reputation
  • Step 2: Build a positive brand reputation
  • Step 3: Monitor your reputation 
  • Step 4: Constantly improve reputation
• Conclusion

What is brand reputation? Definition

Brand reputation is how others perceive your company, product, or service.

It’s a sum of multiple things: visual identification (like a logo), customer experiences, quality of your products, public relations, corporate culture, community engagement, corporate responsibility, and so on.

Essentialy, brand reputation is a public perception. It is shaped by all actions and interactions regarding your brand.

Seems like a complex issue? Indeed, it is complex. As complex as an elephant.

Do you know there is only one way to eat the elephant? A bite at a time.

So, let’s take the first bite by answering how to check your brand reputation quickly.

How can you quickly check your brand reputation?

How could you know your real online reputation? Are there any magical ways to discover what others think about your brand quickly and accurately?

Fortunately – yes!

There are many brand reputation management tools that track and analyze your public perception.

Some of these solutions provide features to check your brand’s reputation immediately.

One such tool is Brand24 – an AI-powered media monitoring software that allows you to collect real-time mentions of your brand.

The tool offers a very handy feature called Reputation Score. It’s a numerical metric presenting the level of trust and credibility of a particular brand.

The scale ranges from -100 (extremely negative reputation) to 100 (extremely good reputation).

Here is what it looks like for Rockstar Games:

Fine, but should you even bother?

Does brand reputation matter?

Why is brand reputation important?

Let’s make it clear: brand reputation is a critical factor that impacts almost every aspect of a business.

The strong brand reputation:

• Encourages loyalty and trust, making customers more likely to continue buying your products or services;
• Attracts more customers and opportunities by setting you apart from your competitors;
• Helps survive in difficult times, as trusted brands are more likely to retain support when things go wrong;
• Increases business value because a strong brand reputation enables to sell products and services at higher prices (that’s why iPhones are expensive!) and attracts more investors;
• Attracts top talents since people prefer to work for companies with a good brand reputation.

According to Deloitte, 90% of executives ranked reputation as the companies’ most significant risk area.

Now, let me show you a real-life example of a situation when a bad brand reputation nearly ruined a well-known company.

In 2016, Wells Fargo – one of the world’s largest and most respected banks in the US – was rocked by a massive scandal.

For years, the company’s employees opened millions of fake bank accounts for customers without their knowledge. Why? Because Wells Fargo’s employees were pressured to meet unrealistic sales goals.

The fake accounts scandal caused a huge blow to Wells Fargo’s brand reputation.

Customers were angry. Many of them switched banks. Even those who weren’t directly affected.

This loss of trust also hurt the company financially, as many investors pulled out their money. Not to mention multi-billion dollar fines and settlements.

Wells Fargo has been working to fix its reputation since the scandal, but skepticism from customers and investors is continuously hurting its performance and financial stability.

“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation and only one bad one to lose it.”

Benjamin Franklin

Brand reputation strategy

Step 1: Examine your current reputation

To start building your brand reputation management strategy, you should know your current reputation.

Treat this first step as a reference point to benchmark if your actions support a positive brand image or quite the opposite.

How to do it in practice?

As stated before, you can use one of many online tools that streamline this initial phase.

Preferably, you should find software that uses the constantly rising power of artificial intelligence. And that accesses as many sources as possible.

Brand24 meets all the criteria.

It uses advanced AI models to measure the most crucial metrics regarding your brand’s reputation, analyze sentiment throughout multiple social & non-social platforms, and automate the whole process.

Measure Reputation Score

Begin understanding your overall brand perception by checking your Reputation Score.

Simply put, Brand24 gathers all your brand mentions shared on the web.

With the help of AI, the tool does the text & context analysis to uncover if the particular mention is positive or negative and its’ estimated reach.

Here, you can see what it looks like for Qatar Airways.

The Qatari company faces quite a poor brand reputation, but the current trend is slightly improving.

Thanks to Reputation Score, you get:

• Quick overview of your current brand reputation;
• Information about how your past & existing efforts have been impacting your overall brand perception;
• The competitive edge of brand reputation looks compared to the others.

Conduct the sentiment analysis of your brand

If the Reputation Score provides a general overview of your brand reputation, sentiment analysis delves into more detailed insights.

This process involves analyzing text data to detect the emotions behind each mention.

Usually, the tools equipped with sentiment analysis feature identify three types of sentiment: positive, negative, and neutral.

In practice, detailed sentiment analysis is a road sign guiding where you should focus your attention and resources—for example, by responding to negative reviews, comments, and opinions.

As you know, people express their thoughts and opinions everywhere. Social media platforms and sites to leave online reviews (like Yelp or TripAdvisor) are just the most obvious ones.

Sentiment analysis allows you to recognize which sources enhance your positive brand reputation. Or, quite the opposite, identify the favorite space of your critics and haters.

That’s why you need a tool to access as many sources as possible.

Brand24 tracks & analyzes the sentiment of public mentions across various platforms:

• Social media (Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Telegram, and Twitch);
• Video platforms & podcasts;
• News sites, blogs, forums, and other websites;
• Review sites.

Moreover, the tool’s sentiment analysis is supported by AI features. It’s important as manual analysis is a time-consuming task.

You can see a brief summary of your sentiment analysis in the AI Metrics Analysis tab.

For example, you can check which source brings you the most negativity.

In Qatar Airways’s case, the main source of its negative brand reputation is the X (Twitter), followed by Facebook. The company should consider strengthening its positive presence there.

The Anomaly Detector is another example of how a great AI feature can streamline your sentiment analysis and thus – build a brand reputation properly.

In short, the Anomaly Detector looks for any unusual behavior in your tracked project, i.e., an unexpected spike in mentions.

Later, it searches the web to discover what may have caused that anomaly.

In the end, the Anomaly Detector presents the conclusion in one or two essential sentences.

As you see, Qatar Airways experienced an unusual spike in mentions on February 27th.

According to the Anomaly Detector, the increased activity was caused by two events: shifting the company’s operations to the new airport and the risk of a collision of Qatar Airways’ plane over Somalia.

Discover emotions around your brand

Whereas sentiment analysis detects the positive or negative brand reputation, emotion analysis goes even further.

It shows the precise feelings your target audience has towards your brand.

The abovementioned AI Metrics Analysis can detect the following emotions: disgust, admiration, sadness, joy, fear, and anger.

Such a feature equips you with more detailed knowledge on where to pivot your efforts to build brand reputation.

Check emojis included in discussions about your brand

Emojis have become an integral part of online communication. They’re designed to express feelings and share emotions in a way that words alone sometimes can’t.

Therefore, it’s good to know which emojis are the most frequently used when people talk about your brand online.

The Emoji Analysis is a simple feature that presents the intuitive matrix of these graphic symbols. The larger and more centered emoji, the more frequently people use it when discussing your brand.

Discover whether influencers talk about your brand in a positive or negative way

As you surely know, not every voice on the Internet is equal. People with more reach and an engaged audience have more influence. Well, that’s why they’re called influencers.

Therefore, your brand reputation involves identifying your key positive and negative influencers.

To assess it quickly, just go to Brand24’s Influencer Analysis tab.

There, you’ll discover who the most influential authors are who speaks about your brand.

Take a look at the sentiment of the topics

Every brand, product, or company triggers discussions around specific topics. It strongly depends on the context in which the brand operates.

For example, Qatar Airways is a brand mostly recognized as an airline. However, the company engages in multiple sports sponsorships, including football, F1, cricket, and so on.

Therefore, people may mention Qatar Airways in many different contexts.

That’s why monitoring these topics is essential to see which are most popular and whether they’re viewed positively or negatively.

Because you can have an overall favorable brand reputation, but it may be harmed by one topic.

The Brand24’s AI Topic Analysis detects & examines the most important contexts in which your brand is discussed.

It summarizes the topic’s popularity, the most important phrases used in online discussions, sentiment share, interactions share, share of voice, etc.

Step 2: Build a positive brand reputation

After understanding your current brand reputation, you can take a second step – build a more positive brand image!

The following tips are universal. Even if you’re happy with your present situation, ensure that you apply them:

• Build a strong brand identity
  Whether you like it or not, people judge the book by its cover. Your logo, color schemes, typography, tone of voice, and brand values shape the people’s perception of your brand image.
  
  A consistent brand identity positively impacts how others perceive you and sets customers’ expectations from their interactions with your brand.
  
  The more harmonic your brand identity is, the higher the chance your company’s image will be positive in customers’ eyes.
  
  
• Deliver quality products or services
  That’s a no-brainer. If you want to earn customer trust, you just have to sell high-quality products or services. Need evidence?
  
  According to Hubspot, 74% of customers perceive product quality as the most important factor in keeping them loyal to a brand.
  
  So, if you want to build your customer loyalty, give them quality!
  
  
• Set up a strong online presence
  Online presence and brand visibility are other essential elements you should implement if you take your brand reputation strategy seriously.
  
  In practice, you should establish an active social media presence to interact with existing & potential customers and engage with your community.
  
  Also, do not forget about public relations strategy! It helps spread your message and manage a crisis if necessary.

Step 3: Monitor your reputation 

Brand reputation is not given once and for all. It constantly fluctuates.

Therefore, after examining your brand reputation and implementing good practices to improve it, the third step should be monitoring your brand performance.

The best way to know if your actions strengthen your brand reputation is to have a reference point. In other words, you should compare your performance with the past.

Brand24 allows you to do it.

Visit the Comparison tab, select the Compare Periods feature, and set up the dates to compare. Later, scroll down to see positive and negative sentiment charts.

The dark blue line informs you about the mentions sentiment trend in the present period. The light blue line shows how it looked like in the previous period.

Look at the positive sentiment chart. If the dark line is mainly above the light one, it’s a sign that your efforts to build brand reputation are successful.

On the contrary, if the dark line is mainly over the light one on the negative sentiment chart, you should revise your brand reputation management strategy.

Step 4: Constantly improve reputation

Last but not least, you should constantly work on your positive reputation!

Remember that if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.

So, to build a strong brand reputation, you should implement (and regularly evaluate) the following actions:

• Ask for feedback
  Feedback is a gift. It allows you to understand how your customers perceive your brand, the company’s products, your customer service, and overall brand performance.
  
  Hence, don’t hesitate to ask your customers for honest opinions and treat them seriously!
  
  
• Create excellent Customer Service
  Customer satisfaction should be one of your top priorities. According to a Zendesk report, three out of four consumers spend more with businesses that provide an excellent customer experience.
  
  Define your key customer engagement metrics and take care of them to improve your reputation.
  
  
• Respond to negative reviews, comments, and opinions
  One of the worst things you could do is to leave negativity unaddressed. It can quickly escalate to a brand crisis.
  
  Of course, you can’t prepare for every scenario. It’s impossible. But it’s always better to reduce such a risk.
  
  With the right media monitoring tool, you will never miss an unfavorable brand mention.

Conclusion

Managing your brand’s reputation is more than necessary – it’s a crucial strategy for your long-term success.

By understanding and – even better! – actively shaping how others view your brand, you can significantly influence their trust and loyalty.

Every interaction, every customer review, and every public statement can make a difference.

By monitoring these interactions and actively managing your reputation, you can build a positive reputation that enhances customer relationships and drives business growth.

Final thoughts:

• Regularly monitor your brand’s reputation to stay ahead of potential issues.
• Utilize technology to gather insights and track public perceptions efficiently.
• Tools like Brand24 can help you respond quickly and effectively, keeping your brand’s reputation strong.

Now, you’re prepared to build a strong brand reputation. Congratulations! Sign up for a free Brand24 trial and see how this tool will help you in this process!