Personal branding engages a lot in a more specific and targeted activity of managing its reputation to ensure a positive outlook of the brand. There are two interlinked pieces of this activity: reputation management and reputation marketing. Only novice personal branding managers will claim that the two names represent the same set of tasks and tactics and follow the same set of goals. It can’t be farther from the truth.
The fact is reputation management is quite different from reputation marketing. For starters, the goal of reputation management is to correct the negative stance surrounding a brand. It’s unlike reputation marketing which takes positive opinions about a brand and builds upon it.
This blog post will discuss the two crucial elements of a complete and comprehensive branding strategy and how the two differ from each other.
Reputation Management
This is the backward-looking element of personal branding strategy and concerns with identifying and correcting negative opinions about the brand among the masses. The corrective approach will then only tackle the problem to get rid of the negative reviews or minimize their impacts.
Sometimes, it also takes help from a reputation marketing tactic to prevent further damage as quickly as possible, but the nature of this tactic never changes from corrective to proactive or even preventive. In short, this strategy only surfaces in the anticipation of or in the presence of a problem.
Reputation Marketing
Reputation marketing is a forward-looking tactic that cares about amplifying positive opinions already present on the internet and within the offline landscape. Moreover, a reputation marketer will also look at the most demanded benefits from a service and will help the brand build these required skills and packages to make itself more viable.
Reputation marketing also depends on input from a concrete and foolproof reputation marketing campaign especially when negative comments and opinions become so loud that they start threatening the positive image of the brand.
Here is a brief overview of the two personal branding tactics. Let’s dive deep and explore their differences in detail.
Forward Versus Backward Looking
Reputation management starts with monitoring existing cues about a brand’s reputation and it doesn’t move far from it. Its purpose of existence ends as soon as the brand corrects the negative opinion. After this point, its only task will be to actively monitor the reputation to detect developing negative news about it as early as possible.
Reputation management is always forward-looking. A small part of reputation marketing indeed takes input from existing happy customers and clients, but that’s it. Most of its activities are proactive and carefully crafted to build a positive image and propagate it. So, you will see the acts of following up on the client to know about their satisfaction with the service and then sharing their expression of satisfaction with the world included in an average reputation marketing campaign.
Corrective versus Constructive
At the end of the day, the goal of both tactics is to let the right message reach the masses, but one of these tactics focuses on correcting the wrong and the other focuses on building the right one and propagating it.
On-demand Versus Continued
Many expert personal brand managers will claim that both tactics are ongoing parts of an effective branding strategy and you cannot ignore any one of them during the life cycle of your personal brand. And I agree with that claim. Yet, no one can deny that only an insignificant part of reputation management works in the background most of the time and it only comes in full force when a demand arises. Reputation marketing, on the other hand, remains in full circle on every single day of your brand life.
Different Tools
Reputation management employs different tactics than reputation marketing. The former is more interested in spying on the related stakeholders and learning about the brand’s weaknesses and drawbacks in the eyes of its stakeholders. It uses monitoring tools to do so. Reputation management starts when a brand starts paying close attention to online and offline discussions of its people. The tools are hashtags, social monitoring software solutions, and media mentions.
Unlike management, reputation marketing had nothing to do with listening to people’s discussions about the relevant brand. The only instance where it requires feedback from the stakeholders especially customers when it has to build its service package to respond to this feedback or when it wants to amplify the message of satisfaction from a customer. Survey forms and focus group studies are enough for this tactic to gain feedback from customers. This tactic uses marketing tools more often. So easy examples of its most loved tools include ads, search engine optimization efforts, and social media paid and organic marketing.
Wrapping Up
Brands are built on reputation. Depending on the type of reputation a brand has acquired, it can be a successful brand or a failed one. Brands use two different sets of tactics to manage their reputation. One of these sets is proactive which is reputation marketing and the other is reactive which is reputation management. This blog post talks about these two sets of tactics and how expert branding managers use them individually for the benefit of their brands.
