When creating a brand, it’s crucial to have strategies in place to prevent various types of crises. These can range from reputation issues to severe environmental hazards.
Both established brands and smaller ones aiming for growth should implement measures to mitigate such risks.
While it’s important to be cautious, crises can still occur, often due to negligence or unforeseen circumstances, placing the brand in a difficult situation.
As a brand, you want to avoid any issue, but you especially want to avoid any crisis that affects your reputation. Brands are built on reputation and anything that can or will ruin that should be avoided by all means. Unfortunately, a crisis cannot be completely avoided.
In this article, we will discuss how to rebuild your brand reputation if damaged. But first, we have to explore what makes 2021 different.
2021: The Effects of 2020
The predecessor to 2020 was marked by various disasters that impacted different countries, with one global event standing out: the coronavirus pandemic.
Originating in China, the virus spread rapidly to most parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and even Australia. It disrupted schools and jobs, and sadly, it claimed many lives. As a result, returning to our normal lives became very challenging.
But from a brand reputation point of view, 2021 is a tough place because; It is very easy to offend the public. As a brand in the early 2010s, all you had to worry about was making sure your products were safe and of high quality.
The moment it is discovered that your company was cutting corners or your products weren’t safe, that is where the problem starts and ends.
Furthermore, the internet is filled with false information and information doctoring. It doesn’t take much for someone with access to a computer to easily fake some evidence against your brand and create a public scandal. On the bright side, the same way the internet can work against your brand, it can also work in your favour.
Brand Reputation Rebuilding Strategies
1. Act Quickly:
When you begin to sense or see the signs of an imminent Brand Reputation crisis, the best thing to do is start making plans to stop it as quickly as possible. Situations like this never go away without consequences. So best you start taking action to prevent it from escalating as much as possible.
This involves you analyzing and understanding the situation you’re in. You also need to find out the nature of the crisis; was it a result of a bad Press conference or a harmful substance in the products?
Information like this helps you prepare the kind of response needed immediately.
Furthermore, you need to identify the source of this crisis within your brand. Be it an executive or a brand entity, you need to find out who was responsible or what was not. More importantly, in your quick action process, you need to get in touch with stakeholders and investors as quickly as possible.
2. Keep Track Of The Severity Of The Damage:
Knowledge of how dire the situation is important as it is vital in the planning of the response. The extent of the damage is reflected vividly on social media and financial indicators like sales and share prices.
From the previous point we spoke about getting in touch with stakeholders, they are vital in terms is assessing the damages.
Keeping track of Google search results is another way of keeping track of the damage and severity of the situation.
3. Admit Your Fault:
Admitting faults doesn’t always mean you’re completely in the wrong, sometimes it means you are willing to take responsibility for the situation and correct whatever went wrong.
This is important as the public loves this sort of attitude and it is a great step in rebuilding the brand’s reputation.
Also, let the public know that you’re putting things in place to prevent the situation from repeating itself.
4. Internal Communications:
Getting your team and employees in line is also very important. Letting them understand the task at hand and getting them all on the same page helps a lot.
As a result, you have everyone in the right state of mind to restore the brand’s reputation
5. Action:
Take obvious steps to try to rectify the situation. The audience you want to impress has to see these steps.
You then need to adjust your social media plan. An important aspect of this would be a less aggressive approach to customers in general.
This will also show your brand’s apologetic stance and buttress your stance on taking the blame.
6. Long-term Plans:
From the current debacle, you should be able to draft new plans and procedures to prevent similar situations and also how to handle them as quickly as possible.
Examples Of Brand Reputation Cases
1. Twitter:
In 2019, the social media company Twitter had an incident that led to users losing their money. With the knowledge of the extent of the damage, their first action was to apologize, before warning other users on what was going on.
Then they proceeded to work on rectifying the issues. As a result, they killed any attempt to ridicule their reputation while also impressing users with how well they handled the situation.
2. Nestle:
Nestle is an example of bad reputation management. For some years now, the internet meme community has constantly bashed them for their expensive but not very clean water.
This became worse in 2011 as they had an online argument with some customers who criticized them online
Soon, their outrage and inability to change the minds of the internet will become a big problem. If nothing is done, their profits may start to feel its effects
Conclusion
In Benjamin Franklin’s words, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation but just one to destroy it.” This saying still applies in today’s branding environment, but there’s something extra.
These days, we utilize the internet and other means to restore damaged brand reputations, especially with proper planning and execution.
Hopefully, with these tips, you will be able to stay afloat of any branding risks that will arise. Keep building a profitable brand.
However, if you still need further professional advice on branding, career, and so on, do well to contact us via this mail (fasthireng@gmail.com) or our website www.thefasthire.org.
