Companies with significant marketing budgets are keenly aware of the importance of their reputations, the need to constantly manage them and the complexity of doing so. As a result, most invest a great deal of time and effort into surprisingly exact measurements of just how they are viewed, by whom and why.
In-depth surveys done annually or quarterly, among immediate stakeholders or the broader public, are a typical mainstay. Besides soliciting feedback on obvious issues (product quality, service quality, perceptions of competitors or the relevant market as a whole), these surveys often go into much more detail.
Do you think our packaging is environmentally responsible? Do you think people who work in our company are happy? Would you consider us to be financially stable? Do we invest enough money into social programmes? Other sets of information flow continuously by way of post-interaction surveys (“You recently dealt with our call centre.
Would you complete this short questionnaire to help us improve our service?”); blind random surveys where the company in question is only revealed through specific questions at the end or sometimes not at all; chatter on social media networks; and, of course, measuring the real world impact of advertising.
Financial success, on its own, tends to be seen as a fairly blunt measure. Buying a product isn’t an endorsement of the company that makes it, even if boycotting it can e a direct response to reputation.
Even being passionate about a company isn’t necessarily the same thing as considering it of good repute. Still, a sudden drop in sales or customers walking through the door can be an effective wake-up call if the systems set up specifically to catch issues early on, somehow fail.
How all that data is collated, and subsequently acted on, depends very much on the nature of the company. Mono-brand companies, which operate as a single entity with a single name even if they offer a wide variety of products or services, have it both good and bad in that regard.
Measuring how people feel about a single entity is somewhat simpler than looking at a whole gaggle of subsidiaries or sub-brands, but if something goes wrong it affects the entire business. Mono-brand companies also say they encounter more inertia.
Smaller brands and sub-brands that feed into an overall corporate identity (and vice versa), on the other hand, can have considerable trouble separating the various components of their businesses and the reaction from consumers, but tend to be more nimble when it comes to responding to negative trends.