Brand reputation management: How to measure and improve your company’s standing

In today’s fast-paced and competitive business landscape, understanding your company’s reputation and the perception of your brand among customers, stakeholders, and the public is essential for success.

You need to have a comprehensive understanding of your brand’s reputation to ensure that you are meeting customer expectations and maintaining a positive image.

At Sensu, we have developed an established and unique framework for benchmarking reputation. Our framework provides detailed insight into measurement, perceptions, and attitudes of all stakeholders across four areas: reputation quality, reputation strengths, reputation drivers, and reputation risks.

Reputation quality

The quality of your reputation is determined by the strength of the signal that you hold in the minds of your stakeholders. This includes how well your business is seen, understood, trusted, and how different your offering is compared to your competitors. Understanding the strength of your signal is key to improving your reputation and gaining a competitive edge.

Reputation strengths

The strength of your reputation is measured by the collective perceptions and beliefs held by your stakeholders around nine key attributes crucial to reputation. These attributes include your ability to perform successfully, belong and be a good corporate citizen, lead in your sector and on topics important to your stakeholders, create innovation, deliver products/services that meet or exceed needs and expectations, being a fair and caring employer, steward your organisation well, deliver on the key brand attributes expected by stakeholders to your organisation (customers, communities etc), and deliver on your stated company values. By understanding these attributes, you can work to enhance them and build a stronger reputation.

Reputation drivers and influencers

The topics and issues shaping your sector and your customers’ priorities are crucial to your reputation. It’s also important to understand how you’re influencing (and being influenced by) these themes. By identifying which individuals, organisations, and media are most influencing customer awareness and understanding of these themes, you can work to build relationships with these influencers and strengthen your reputation.

Reputation risks

Understanding the issues or aspects of your reputation that are attracting the greatest negative emotion and heightened visibility over time is key to mitigating reputation risks. By proactively addressing these issues and risks, you can protect your reputation and maintain the trust of your stakeholders.

Our unique approach

Our reputation benchmarking framework provides consistency in reputation measurement and affords accurate comparison across stakeholder groups.

It also enables us to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of your reputation and the priorities for improvement. For example, would your reputation be better enhanced by increased visibility or by stronger association with the attributes most valued by your key stakeholders? Additionally, it helps determine whether reputation improvement requires organisational change or better communication.

Finally, our framework considers the different priorities and insights of each stakeholder group. This allows for a subjective interpretation of “success,” which may be very different depending on a stakeholder’s position and agenda. For example, the needs of a shareholder may differ significantly from those of a customer.

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Measuring and improving your reputation can be a challenging task, but with our benchmarking framework, we can provide you with detailed insights and guidance on how to improve your reputation, mitigate risks, and ultimately gain a competitive edge in your industry.

Example of our work

At Sensu, we are proud to have worked with a range of clients across different industries, helping them understand and enhance their reputation.

One such client is the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the world’s leading chemistry community. Our work with RSC involved using our established and unique framework of reputation to provide detailed insight into the perceptions and attitudes of their stakeholders.

Through our analysis, we were able to identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of RSC’s reputation and provide recommendations for improvement. Our partnership with RSC has helped them better understand their reputation and prioritise areas for development, ultimately leading to increased stakeholder engagement and trust.

“We have been working with Sensu since our brand refresh in 2019. The quarterly insight is invaluable to understand where our messages are getting cut through with our varied audiences, and in developing our external communications campaigns. It’s great to be able to use this insight to evolve our organisational messaging and focus, because we know what reinforces our brand for our audiences.” – Claire Southgate, brand and communications lead at the Royal Society of Chemistry.