Reliability and Association in Business

Brand perception is important. This has direct ties to your reputation, your word-of-mouth marketing, and ultimately, your entire digital presence. You want to be seen as reliable, as a brand that can deliver consistently effective results, and do so with a firm understanding of what’s best for your audience.

Even if this is something that you manage to do consistently, there’s another consideration that can play into this initial one, your associations. If you’re associating with other brands and businesses that fly in the face of this perception, this could be something that ends up damaging yours. This means you need to not just think about your own brand, but the network you find yourself a part of.

Deliver the Best Results

As simple as it sounds, a solid bedrock foundation to aspire to could simply be to function as reliably as possible. If you build up a reputation of delivering high quality, you might find that this is something that sticks when audiences are thinking of you.

However, your services are going to be closely tied to other services that you rely on. For example, if you have a product that you sell to your audiences, you might need a delivery company to get this to them. In your mind, this could be a distinct entity from you, but in terms of your customer experience, it’s all the same. Identifying reliable shipping companies like shiply.com can prevent this kind of association from dragging attention away from the product itself and keep people coming back to you.

PR Situations

Of course, where this might all come to a boiling point, could be in a bad PR situation. Once a business that you’re tightly associated with finds itself in hot water, people start to look for those who are close to it and look to determine where they stand in the situation.

As with any PR situation, you need to be careful in your response, and this might mean not responding as soon as possible as a hasty response could have unintended consequences. You don’t want to burn all your professional bridges, but you don’t want to worsen the public perception of your brand. Having a more thorough understanding of the dos and don’ts of this situation might help you to prepare for it, should it arise.

Influencers

The question of association can become more difficult when you’re partnering with business entities like influencers who might be more prone to expressing opinions than conventional businesses. However, partnerships with influencers can also be incredibly lucrative due to how they can broaden your audience, delivering your brand through a voice that consumers trust.

It just means that you might have to scout out who you do business with as opposed to being indiscriminate. The rewards could be bountiful, yes, but caution might help you to avoid the aforementioned PR crisis. Through your market research, you might have identified influencers who best align with your own brand and you might think of this as a simple extension of that.