Branding14 Feb 2024
Transforming Your Brand Reputation: Best practices
In the digital age, where every click, comment, and review holds sway over your business's destiny, the significance of branding has never been more profound. As a Brand Strategist for over 20 years, I've witnessed firsthand the metamorphosis that occurs when a company harnesses the potent force of branding to shape its reputation. Let's face it. Every brand has a reputation. It lives in the hearts and minds of your customers and employees, your suppliers and investors. And they change, as do their values and preferences as societal 'norms' shift over time. The question is - what are you doing to INFLUENCE their perception of you?
Picture this: A business with a lacklustre or tired image, struggling to stand out amidst a growing sea of new competitors, slowly losing market share and relevancy over time. Now envision the same business, but with a compelling, relevant and differentiated brand story that resonates deeply with its ideal audience. The difference lies not just in perception but in tangible outcomes – from increased customer and employee loyalty to heightened market visibility and, ultimately, sustainable growth.
More than simply a marketing tool, a brand can be the guiding inspiration for HOW you do business; a guiding light, infused in every touchpoint and inspiring the right focus, energy and storytelling at every stage of the customer and employee experience.
In this blog article, we'll delve into the transformative power of branding and how it can elevate your business reputation to new heights. Whether you're a startup looking to make your mark, or an established enterprise aiming to revitalise or refresh your image, understanding the power of branding to shift perceptions and transform reputations is paramount.
Join me on a journey where we'll explore a strategic process and the latest insights to unlock the full potential of your brand. By the end, you'll be equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to carve out a distinct identity in today's competitive landscape and leave a lasting impression on your audience. It's time to embark on a journey of brand transformation – are you ready?
Why Corporate Branding matters?
Having a compelling Corporate Brand, one that is 'magnetic', can significantly impact an organisation in multiple ways.
Firstly, it can help attract and retain the right people (customers, employees and investors) to your business. In a competitive market, customers are not only looking for 'good value from a product or service, but also for a brand that is a reflection of who they are. A brand that shares my values and beliefs is a way of showcasing 'this is me - this is what I stand for'.
When crafted strategically (which means the brand is informed by data), an effective Corporate Brand can more quickly and easily communicate these aspects to potential customers, employees and investors, thus increasing the chances of them engaging (and being 'sticky') with your business.
Secondly, Corporate Branding can boost existing customer and employee engagement and retention. Customers who feel aligned with a Corporate Brand are more likely to make purchases of a higher value and purchase more often as well as being positive advocates for the business, products or services. Equally, employees working for a company with a 'magnetic' Corporate Brand are more likely to feel proud of their association with the organisation, leading to increased commitment and engagement. This, in turn, can reduce employee turnover rates, boost productivity and enhance job satisfaction.
Lastly, a positive Corporate Brand can contribute to an organisation's overall reputation, attracting customers and top talent while improving the company's image and standing in the industry.
Best practices for designing a transformative Corporate Brand identity.
The quality of the process of developing a Corporate Brand identity is of paramount importance. Such a process can facilitate the creation of a Corporate Brand that authentically embodies a company's purpose, values, mission, personality and value proposition that will resonate with existing and prospective customers, employees, suppliers and investors. What is key, however, is understanding that the process of branding is to create a powerful tool to shift the perceptions of your target audience. Branding is so much more than just a logo and a tagline. It is a clear signal of the WAY you do business that pervades every touchpoint, constantly shifting how your ideal audience perceives you.
Some of the best practices for designing a transformative Corporate Brand identity are as follows:
Exploring both the perspectives of customers and employees is crucial when crafting an authentic Corporate Brand identity. Here are some key stakeholders to engage with:
1. Leaders: Conversing with a company's leaders can furnish valuable insights into its vision, values, aspirations and business goals so the brand can support the journey ahead.
2. Sales, Marketing & Customer Service Teams: They know the customer's pain points better than anyone else and why they choose you over competitors (or don't!)
3. Customers: Uncover their honest perceptions. Are they misinformed? Is there a gap between expectations and promises not being delivered?
4. Suppliers & Industry Partners: What's their perception of your brand, product and or service? How are they influencing customers?
Market research is crucial in developing a distinctive Corporate Brand identity. Here are some effective methods to approach market research:
1. Examine competitors: Conduct thorough research on competitors to gain insights into their Corporate Brand identity and positioning. This research can help identify areas where the brand can differentiate itself and highlight its unique strengths.
2. Analyse advertising: Look at campaigns, both brand and tactical, and both within and outside the industry to understand the language, tone, and messaging utilised in positioning. This research can help create a unique Corporate Brand that visually stands out.
3. Monitor social media: Monitor social media platforms to gauge the sentiment around the company's brand from prospective customers and employees. This research can provide valuable insights into the company's reputation (revealing misconceptions) and help improve the Corporate Brand's relevancy.
Research is key to developing a transformative Corporate Brand
Hear from our Brand Strategist and Head of Research on why research is integral in creating transformational brand strategies.
A strategic Brand Essence is crucial in shaping an effective Corporate Brand identity. To develop a Brand Essence and validate it, follow these steps:
1. Determine Brand Essence: A Brand Essence is the fundamental inspiration that embodies your company's customer and employee experience. It must be brief, yet remarkable. It must be single-minded in capturing the distinctive nature of your organisation. Taking the proof points from your research and aligning with the business's goals, drives the creation of your Brand Essence. Note that this is NOT an external marketing tagline, but a strategic tool to ‘hang your hat on’. It should be authentic, relatable and differentiating.
2. Validate your Brand Essence: To obtain feedback, test your Brand Essence with your stakeholders including your Executive Leadership team. This input can assist in determining whether the essence accurately reflects your company's vision and customer strategy. It’s a great way to get buy-in from senior leadership BEFORE you get creative.
Crafting your Value Propositions (VPs) is crucial in crafting a relatable Brand identity. Below are the necessary steps to create a VP:
Identify the company's distinctive selling points: Determine what sets the company’s customer and employee experience apart and distinguishes it from its competition. These unique selling points can provide the foundation for the VP.
1. Determine the target audience: Narrow down the target audience for your VP. This might include existing customers, potential customers and specific demographic groups. Do the same for employees.
2. Create strategic pillars: Develop pillars that embody the VP's critical components. These pillars should align with the company's unique selling points and the target audience's needs and expectations. They should be authentic, relatable and differentiating.
3. Gather feedback through focus groups: Test the VP with focus groups to obtain insight into its effectiveness and appeal. Utilise this feedback to refine and enhance the VP as needed.
4. Communicate the VP: Spread the word about the VP throughout all levels of the organisation to ensure everyone is on the same page BEFORE you go to market externally. Usually, this is done in conjunction with a brand refresh (next step).
A brief and striking statement that captures an organisation's unique value proposition and brand essence is known as a tagline. It helps to provide people with a clear understanding of what distinguishes the business, produce or service from its competitors and why they should consider choosing it.
In contrast, a narrative is a more comprehensive and detailed description of the experience you can expect from the brand. It tells the story of the company's purpose, ethos, culture and values.
When combined, a talent tagline and a narrative create a strong foundation for the Corporate Brand's identity, delivering positive, perception-shifting messages to your ideal target audience.
When it comes to building an effective Corporate Brand identity, it is the combination of strategy AND design where the magic happens. Research leads to insights, leads to Strategic Essence, leads to Value Proposition, leads to an informed Brand Design (not just pretty for the sake of it) but a 'hard-working' design that cuts through and resonates. This can include logo, typography, tone of voice, colour palette, iconography, imagery and more.
It is imperative to submit the concepts for the Corporate Brand to customer and employee scrutiny once developed. Feedback is critical to gauge the resonance with the company's authentic positioning, culture and values. The insights gleaned from customers and employees prove invaluable in deciphering the attractiveness or unattractiveness of the concepts and identifying potential areas for refinement. This is the promise that we are making for the Corporate Brand - so it must feel 'real' otherwise it could cause customer and employee attrition and be costly for the business.
Following customer and employee feedback, it is necessary to refine the concepts to ensure they align with the company's authentic values and cultural identity. This refinement process may involve revising messaging, adjusting tone, or modifying visual elements to resonate better with customers and employees. The ultimate objective is to develop a final Brand Identity that you know will resonate with your ideal target audience, ensuring your marketing spend will be worth investing in.
Establishing guidelines to delineate the essential components of your Corporate Brand, including but not limited to your Customer Value Proposition (CVP), Employer Value Proposition (EVP), Tagline, Narrative, intended audience, brand communication templates, is instrumental in developing a coherent and persuasive Corporate Brand that effectively resonates with your coveted customers and employees. Such guidelines are a blueprint to ensure consistency and efficacy in your Corporate Branding strategy.
After successfully crafting your Corporate Brand, promoting and disseminating it to your intended audience is the next crucial step to influencing your reputation. Employ cohesive messages and designs across your owned channels such as website, social handles, sales collateral and signage to reach your ideal customers effectively. Ensure that your messaging remains coherent across all platforms and that you specifically emphasise your Corporate Brand's critical components (such as your Value Propositions) in your promotional materials.
Changing perceptions of your brand and therefore your reputation takes time. If budget permits, consider utilising PR or paid advertising to amplify the 'good news' stories around your new brand positioning. This will greatly extend your reach beyond existing and loyal customers and employees and attract a new, larger and more ideal audience.
Formulating a transformational Corporate Brand presents numerous advantages for organisations:
1. Sets your organisation apart from competitors: A Corporate Brand identity enables organisations to differentiate themselves from other competitors in the market, helping achieve higher market share.
2. Enhances customer attraction: A robust, data-led Corporate Brand identity can aid organisations in becoming more relatable and memorable to the customers they aim to attract. By maintaining a consistent and cohesive message across all channels, organisations can create a lasting impression on customers, making them more likely to recall and purchase in the future.
3. Fostering customer engagement and retention: Crafting a Corporate Brand identity also facilitates organisations in engaging with their current customers. When customers feel connected to the organisation's personality, purpose, values and culture, they are more likely to remain loyal and committed.
4. Attracting and retaining top talent: In the ongoing 'war for talent', a magnetic Corporate Brand will attract leading employees to be a part of your journey and align with your values. This builds a sense of pride within the organisation which in turn has a positive impact on productivity and flows through to improved customer satisfaction as well.
Trends in crafting a Corporate Brand identity
Designing a transformative Corporate Brand identity is a fluid and progressive undertaking, subject to the influence of evolving market trends and shifting customer and employee expectations. As such, organisations must stay abreast of emerging trends in crafting a compelling and enduring Corporate Brand identity.
One such trend is the need to create a Corporate Brand identity that is uniquely ownable, thereby setting it apart from competitors. Companies increasingly focus on developing Value Propositions that are authentic and will resonate with their targeted audience to achieve this goal. A few ways Corporate Brands can achieve this is by leveraging the unique journey the business is on, and infusing human storytelling elements into their marketing content. Making sure you include ‘differentiated value’. This means delivering value to customers and employees that is designed to be DIFFERENT to what other competitors offer.
Another emerging trend is the use of user-generated content as a means of showcasing an organisation's Brand personality. By encouraging customers and employees to share their experiences and stories through social media and other channels, companies can offer a genuine and authentic perspective on their products, and services as well as organisational culture and values. Keep in mind their social networks have 10x the reach of your corporate network of followers.
The third trend is using video to convey authentic narratives of real customers and employees. This approach emphasises their experiences, backgrounds, and motivations, fostering trust and credibility while effectively communicating the organisation's values and ethos in a more human way. Because people trust people over corporations, videos are one of the most authentic ways to create content and quickly build credibility and trust.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you create an ownable Corporate Brand?
Developing a distinctive Corporate Brand that embodies an organisation's identity requires a purposeful and strategic approach. To that end, organisations can take several key steps to establish an ownable Corporate Brand:
Incorporate the organisation's journey: To establish a deeper connection with your target audience, organisations should promote their aspirational journey through their brand storytelling. This means sharing the story of the organisation's planned growth, challenges ahead and milestones along the way. Doing so can help people understand the organisation's mission, purpose, ethos, values and culture. This takes people 'on the journey' and enrols them in supporting where you want to take the brand in the future.
Integrate corporate values: An organisation's corporate values are the guiding principles that shape its business. They are crucial to the Corporate Brand, providing customers, employees and investors insight into the organisation's culture and behavioural expectations. To establish an ownable Corporate Brand, organisations should ensure that their corporate values are clear, pertinent and aligned with their mission and purpose.
Integrate human brand elements: By integrating human brand elements into the Corporate Brand, organisations can create a Brand that is uniquely their own. This includes incorporating authentic and relatable people stories as 'evidence' that the brand is being 'real' about delivering on its promise. People trust people over corporations, so the more human-like you can make your brand the more relatable your brand will be.
What are the three critical components of Corporate Branding?
Corporate Branding constitutes a strategic approach aimed at attracting, engaging, and retaining the right customers, employees, suppliers and investors. Some critical components that make up Corporate Branding include:
Thorough research on customers, employees and competitors: Before developing a Corporate Branding strategy, organisations ought to conduct extensive research to comprehend the needs, values and perceptions of their customers and employees about the company. This research should also encompass a profound understanding of the competitive landscape in terms of how other companies are positioning themselves in the market.
Craft a Value Proposition (VP): A Customer Value Proposition (CVP) is a strategic marketing proposition (including pillars and narrative) that outlines the unique benefits and rewards that a customer receives in exchange for their purchase, loyalty and advocacy. Equally an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) does much the same but appeals directly to employees and potential candidates and what attracts and retains them. A well-outlined CVP and EVP can assist brands in distinguishing themselves from competitors and attracting the right type of customers and employees. An effective VP should be authentic, relevant, differentiating and aligned with the organisation's values and culture.
Authentic customer and employee stories that align with the organisation's overall strategy:
These narratives can take the form of testimonials, videos and social media posts, and they are instrumental in showcasing the company's purpose, personality, culture, values and mission. Such stories must be genuine and authentic for maximum efficacy, accurately reflecting the organisation's core principles and values.
Need help to transform your Brand reputation?
At Belong Creative, we’ve been helping some of Australia’s most desirable brands attract, engage and retain the right people for their business since 2009. From crafting human-centric CVP and EVPs, to designing 'ownable' brands, we help businesses transform their reputations through research and strategic-led storytelling; written, photographic and video. We offer an end-to-end solution for people-focused organisations that want to succeed by creating more belonging with their customers, employees, suppliers and investors.
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