Ronn Torossian
(Photo : Ronn Torossian)

According to Ronn Torossian, the PR industry is, by its very nature, an all-encompassing one. Whether it's a small business or a large corporation, PR can improve a company's image, help a new business gain visibility, and find its audience, while increasing sales and boosting profits.

A brand's reputation is essentially the way the public perceives a company. It's about an image that a company projects to its audience of potential buyers and how it is perceived by those who don't work for it or interact with it on a daily basis. A favorable business reputation can lead to increased sales and profits, while a negative one will destroy a brand's credibility in the eyes of potential clients sometimes to irreparable ends.

Some PR professionals might refer to reputation management as damage control. Managing a brand's reputation involves mitigating any negative information that may be circulating about a business. Creating and implementing proper communication strategies and messaging to promote a positive brand image is essential.

A Positive Brand Reputation is Essential

Every existing business already has a reputation. It is what people think about the company and its products or services. A good reputation can help a business grow, but a bad reputation can make it harder for people to trust a brand.

Listening for feedback from all people is essential because different groups will view organizations and their offerings differently. Employees will always communicate a different idea about the company that isn't quite as apparent to customers or outsiders.

The same goes for customers. If a customer had a bad experience at one specific business location, they might not necessarily choose to share it with the public. However, they'll remember that experience when deciding whether to patronize that business again and it will color how they talk to friends and colleagues about the brand overall.

Reputation is also affected by what people hear through word-of-mouth or social media platforms. If someone has a good story about their experience with a company, and they share it with friends or on their Facebook page, this will incite others to want to experience it for themselves as well.

How to Manage Brand Reputation

The first step towards building a positive reputation for your brand is ensuring you understand how customers, employees and the media honestly perceive a company.

PR is an effective tool used by companies that can positively affect a brand's reputation in multiple ways; It creates trust among consumers and keeps them informed about important company updates while informing the public about new products/services launched by a brand. PR services are also essential when your brand might find itself in a crisis.

Organizations can deploy several strategies to manage damage caused to a brand's reputation and to begin to rebuild the public's trust in your organization. Some strategies are used more frequently than others, but the key is deploying different techniques and creating ways of evaluating those that work best for individual brands.

Personnel conduct: Employees play the most crucial role in shaping brand reputation, especially since employee actions will have the greatest direct effect on whether a brand's reputation is positive or not. For instance, if someone steals from a company, this might be reported by the media and could lead to negative coverage for the company in newspapers, on television or online. A talented PR team will have prepared solutions that either quell the spread of the negative story or create a new narrative that puts a positive spin on the story in relation to the brand's public persona.

Standard of Service Delivery:  Torossian says similar to ensuring proper personnel conduct is ensuring there is a uniform standard of service delivery at a brand's locations. Customers have become much more conscious and deliberate today, so they need to be reminded that they receive the same quality of service and product every time they patronize any of a brand's locations. Failure on a business's part to create this type of consistency every time your brand touches the public in any way can have negative consequences overall.

Digital Presence: Today, most consumers learn of new brands or find out about new products they want to purchase in one place: online. Ensuring your digital reputation or online reputation stays positive is an entirely different set of strategies a digital PR team will need to be ready to deploy. 

Online reputation management is needed to combat negative reviews online, negative search results, or even the possibility that fake news is spreading about your brand's products or services. The percentage of consumers that learn more about your brand online through social media, or google search is growing by the day and meeting these consumers in their space and creating a positive sentiment around your brand will be the best bet for business and brand growth in 2022. 

Ronn Torossian is a public relations executive.