Brand & Reputation Management LLC

Brands Create Promises; Reputation is About Expectations

Brand and reputation are connected. A brand makes a promise that creates expectations. Reputation is the expectation of value by a stakeholder vis-a-vis your peers and competitors. So, if you make promises you cannot keep, you will not have the reputation you desire, but you will have the reputation you deserve.

Our process helps organizations to understand where and how they create value and how to make certain that they are making promises they can keep and delivering expected value at all "touch point". It's very powerful!

Brands Create Promises; Reputation is About Expectations

5 Rules For Brands to Live By

1. Clearly define and articulate your brand promise and be sure to meet or exceed the expectations you create

2. Strive for differences customers can understand and value as reasons to select you over other options

3. Know which customers you match well with and make sure you are relevant in the lives of your customers

4. Make the total brand experience consistent and worthwhile--connect your touch-points, especially service

5. Make sure that you are not only different, but also relevant (important to the customer's life and work). Relevance the "stickiness" that keeps customers from leaving to something different or a lower-priced alternative

We Don't Give You a Brand. We Help You Discover Your Brand

Our proprietary DIFFERS process engages you in conversation and reflection and challenges you to see yourself from the perspective of your competitors and your key stakeholders. It helps you disover your brand--your true differentiation and relevance that will make stakeholders want to deal with you versus others. Our clients continue to tell us that they are fully committed to what comes out of our process because it is theirs, not something that a consulting firm has proposed.

There is too much emphasis on differentiation. We believe in differentiation, but more in relevance--being important in the lives of the people who matter to your success. The more relevance you have against competitors, the more value you build for yourself and the more you take value that might otherwise go to competitors. This allows you to hire and retain the best talent and customers, and to attract more of the capital going to the sector. Reputation lowers your cost of capital and eases value creation. Do we have your attention?

Harness the Power of the Social Web

Consumers live, breath and guzzle brand information daily. Companies that hope to build and maintain their brand and reputation must have a well-developed social media strategy. We help you approach the social web in unique ways to create "one-voice" so that you communicate proactively and with transparency inside and outside your organization.

Reputation Risk--The "Cracks in the Wall"

Reputation risk occurs when experience of stakholoders falls below expectations. As we build reputation, we also must identify risks and how to deal with them.

An anology is "cracks in the walls" of our home. We can rationalize the cracks as being insignificant, or an "opitcal issue" that can be fixed with putty and paint, or we can make certain that the cracks are not harbingers of problems in the walls or foundation.

Reputation risks appear like cracks in the walls. How we treat them may well determine if they stay blemishes or open into full-blown crises, in which we begin to "bleed" value. Leadership and corporate culture are the determinants of how we decide to deal with the cracks that appear in every business.

Latest Blog post:

Lessons from Yahoo! and JPMorganChase

Scott Thompson did the right thing by resigning as CEO of Yahoo! It was the only viable course of action that the board could allow to save an already sinking ship. Thompson was found to have falsified his resume. He then blamed it on the headhunting firm…