Connecting Brand and Reputation

I am starting to come to the realization after all of these years that brand is the essential part of reputation. Brand is about framing expectations; reputation is about the delivery of experience commensurate with those expectations. Brand is the control that reputation management lacks. We may not be able to control our reputation, but we can control the identity, attributes and associations we have, and we can work toward greater consistency of delivering experience to customers and other stakeholders.

So many brand projects stop with positioning, taglines and logos. They do not go the next step toward developing the processes to connect employees to the brand attributes so that they are both willing and able to "live the brand". Many employees are willing, but unable to understand what they are expected to do. This situation was found in a study by Mjken Schultz and Mary Jo Hatch. They examined the corporate branding efforts of companies globally and found that the missing piece for many was organizational change. In fact, they found that most employees at the firms that studied had not idea what was expected of them in delivering the brand promise, and as a result were not committed to it.

Consider that the companies employees are the most important stakeholders the company has since they are interpreting for customers and others every day the value--or lack of it--of the company.

So brand management is critical, but it will only be fully worthwhile when companies understand that their brands create expectations of performance and that they must take the steps necessary to make certain they can close the gap between expectations and experience.