Did you read the recent Yahoo finance news article about 2013’s Top 10 Best Brands and Worst Brands in America? A company called “CoreBrand” conducts an annual survey to determine the most and least respected corporate brands based on the company’s “Familiarity and Favorability data.” This goes beyond the most well known, the most heavily advertised or the highest profit making companies. This measures people’s perceptions of a company’s trustworthiness and respect among consumers. Most of these major brands have an international presence, but the survey results are based on American sentiments.
According to the study results released August 20, these are the 2013 Top 10 Most Respected Brands:
- PepsiCo and Coca-Cola (tied)
- Hershey’s
- Harley-Davidson
- Bayer
- Johnson & Johnson
- Kellogg’s
- Campbell’s Soup Company
- Colgate-Palmolive
- Estee Lauder
And, according to the same study, these are the Top 10 Least Respected Brands in 2013:
- Delta
- Philip Morris
- H&R Block
- Denny’s
- Big Lots
- Best Buy
- J.C. Penney
- Capital One
- Rite Aid
- Foot Locker
Some of these results may surprise you, as your own personal experience with an individual company may have been excellent and you consider yourself a loyal customer. In some cases, you might have issues with their competition or there is no convenient alternative, so you must use their products or services regardless of whether you like the company or not.
The point is, if you are a business in today’s world and your customers were to be asked how satisfied they are with your products or services, how would your brand measure up? Most people want to believe that every customer is happy and consider complaints to be a reflection on the disgruntled customer themselves, not something that the company has actually done wrong or needs improvement. A smart manager realizes that a complaint is an opportunity to not only make things right for the customer, but a warning flag that something in your operations is not delivering up to expectations and needs to be fixed.
In my post about Amazon’s affiliate program, I mentioned how easy it is to earn money as an affiliate with Amazon because:
- Amazon itself is a globally recognized brand with a good reputation
- Amazon carries popular brands already familiar to people and rarely has products returned
- Although Amazon started out selling books, they have evolved and grown into a company that sells just about anything
Not only does Amazon do an excellent job of meeting each customer’s needs, they are constantly asking for reviews and have top notch customer service. Even if the product you sold didn’t meet your customer’s expectation, if you handle complaints well, in most cases you can keep that customer’s respect and rebuild their trust.
Safeguard all that hard work building your business and creating a brand. If your customer service is lacking, people no longer hesitate to take their complaints to the internet and warn their friends on sites like Facebook, YELP, TripAdvisor.com and Angie’s List. Bad reviews do scare away new business and cost you customers. Brand.com reviews the best ways to optimize search listings and protect brands for small business as well as large corporations.
The U.S. government’s Small Business Administration also has some excellent advice about managing a company’s online reputation and other business issues. Even companies that do not have a web site must be concerned with their online reputation and monitor the most popular sites regularly to protect their brand from negative reviews in directories and social media.