With the birth of a brand, its reputation is
born. Just like the brand itself, the reputation needs to be nurtured and, more
importantly, protected. Reputation can’t be built on what you are promising to
deliver or achieve, it is only dependent on the promises that you keep, on whether
you walk the talk.
It takes years, even decades, to build the
reputation of a luxury brand and just moments to ruin it as the Oracle of Omaha
rightly said. So a brand custodian’s primary responsibility along with building
the brand is to protect and build on the reputation.
With luxury brands, as these are not
personality-dependent, the reputation management is primarily managing the reputation
of the product or service in the eyes of the customers.
With the social media becoming all-powerful, this
is a medium that needs to be kept under strict observation. One tweet can
snowball into a reputation disaster in no time, even for the biggest of the
brands. Not very long back, a huge brand, which is primarily into trunks and other
leather/canvas goods, had released an ad where it showed that the trunks were hand-made.
The reality was different and the trunks were machine-made and only a small
part of the stitching process was manual. This truth after it was exposed on
social media had dented the reputation of the brand significantly.
So, the first lesson is to know that honesty is
the best policy. A brand is basically the sum of its virtues and its reputation
is sum of how much it is living up to those virtues. So if the brand is living
up to its brand promise then it is able to not only protect but also build its
reputation.
A brand has promises to keep. And customer
satisfaction is the biggest promise. Ensuring that a customer is satisfied with
the promises made by the luxury brand is the biggest responsibility of the
brand custodian, besides building the brand. As every touch point of the brand is
responsible for making the brand, they can also ruin the reputation in no time.
Just one rude behaviour by a boutique assistant can generate an apathy in the
mind of the customers and social media can add momentum, mass and voices to
this grievance. So, it is literally a walk on the tightrope. Every element of
the brand has to ensure that only the best is delivered to the customer as they
are the king.
Luxe is experiential. So the premium that a brand
charges for the luxe is largely dependent on the experience of the customer.
Thus one rude behaviour or even a slight reluctance to serve can break it bad.
So, reputation management for a luxury brand
comprises three aspects: living up to the brand promises, living up to the brand
virtues and keeping customer at the centre of its universe.
Let your quest for luxury continue.
