Are Brand and Reputation The Same Thing?
Where your brand strategy will define the cues and connections you want to establish with your audience, your reputation is the feedback, the signals your audience is playing back to you, whether you are connecting, or not.
Often the words reputation and brand get used interchangeably. But are they really the same thing?
To put it simply, brand is how you want the world to see you, and reputation is how the world actually sees you. This is true whether you’re a product or a person.
People often talk about brand damage in relation to an issue or crisis, but it is really important to understand how, whilst these words are interconnected and have a symbiotic relationship, they do in fact deal with very different aspects of the relationship between a subject and its audience.
Brand is the curated message, the company logo, the design, the study of segments, demographics and semiotics.
Reputation is how those elements are interpreted, about the relationship an audience has with those elements, over time. That relationship can be positive, negative or neutral – and is in a constant state of flux, a constant reputational dynamic – which has a direct influence on how, and at what level, an individual interacts with that product or person. Reputation is the relationship that an audience has with a brand.
So this is why I challenge the notion of ‘brand damage.’
I think sometimes people just feel that brand is easier to talk about, whilst reputation is like the abyss, the great unknown.
I believe we need to educate and challenge Leaders and their understanding of the active role they play in their own reputation. We need to bring more meaning and understanding to how leaders can proactively create not only a more positive reputation, but a more robust one.
So, where your brand strategy will define the cues and connections you want to establish with your audience, your reputation is the feedback, the signals your audience is playing back to you, whether you are connecting, or not.
Your reputation is how the world see you, and we need to learn how to listen to that feedback, to adjust, to know when to reposition or when to double-down.
Last year I was on retreat in Fiji and met a wonderful colleague, now friend, Geraldine Ree from Canada. In feeding back my practice to me – she said “So what you’re really saying is - reputation, it doesn’t cost you anything right, until it costs you everything.”
So, the question is, would you leave the responsibility for your most important asset, your reputation, to someone else?
I work with leaders to equip themselves to play a more active role in their reputation, and understand how to navigate issues in complex environments.
How active are you in owning your reputation?
