Seven Secrets to Building a Trusted Brand

Last month, we held our first ‘Attest On-air’ webinar, which was all about ‘how to build a trusted brand.’ To help us, we invited two brand experts (Tom Price from Nomadic and AnnaBrook from Paws.com) to come in, take part and share their wisdom, insight and expertise. Here are our top seven takeaways:

1. Your Brand Is Everything (You Read it Right – Everything)

Your brand perception is made up of everything your brand does (and doesn’t do), and this includes your entire spectrum of business activity:

• How you deal with customer service
• How you put your brand out there (social media, marketing, advertising, PR, etc)
• How you distribute/sell your products (whether that’s online, through a particular retailer or through your own retailer)
• Any charitable work you get involved in, or ethical mission you embark on (for example, Innocent Drinks donate 10% of their profits to charity)
• How you treat your staff and build company culture from the initial interview stage right the way through to complete value integration into your team

Ultimately, it is this complex combination of behaviours and actions that leads to how new and existing customers perceive your brand. And, how they feel about your brand on an emotional level, whether they see your logo, watch an advert, use your product, or walk past a store.

2. Trust Is Essential To Brand-Building (You Can’t Thrive Without It)

The only way to build a strong brand, and to build a positive emotional connection on a mass scale, is to build trust.

You simply cannot build a household name without it.

BUT, do you need to be as big and as iconic as Apple to build brand trust? Not at all. In our webinar, we invited two rapid-growth startups to demonstrate how they went from being completely unknown to having high levels of brand trust within their respective markets. Here’s how they did it, and here’s how YOU can do it, too.

Start off with a brand audit. Go back to basics.

Audit every area of your business and brand activity (see bullet points above).

Through Attest, you can create a customised brand tracker, where you’ll find out key truths about your brand director from consumers, or you can create a bespoke survey, reaching up to 100 million consumers worldwide. Ask them questions directly, and gain instant feedback about how they perceive your brand.

Then, you can use those insights to inform your brand strategy. Here are some important questions to ask yourself before you get started:

• Does your organisation and/or product deliver what it says it’s going to deliver?
• Are you living and breathing your values and mission?
• How consistent and transparent is your wider brand activity?

Authenticity, transparency and consistency are expected in today’s post-2007-recession marketplace.

3. Know Your Customer (And If You Don’t Know Them – Learn)

‘What are potential customers in your niche currently buying? What do they really want and like? And, what do they dislike about their current suppliers?’Anna Brook

If you want to build a strong, trusted brand, find out the answers to these questions, because it’ll enable you to build products tailored to their needs, and build powerful messaging that connects with your audience.

The key to building brand trust is to be clear and transparent about how your product will solve those problems, and be sure to deliver on that promise, always.

4. Bad Product Experiences Met with Great Customer Service Can Create Lifelong Customers

Believe it or not, your most angry customers can go on to become your most loyal customers. If you ever provide bad service to a customer (try to avoid if you can), use that opportunity to learn, and get it right in the future. They’ll appreciate the effort you invest in fixing the problem, and that within itself can create loyalty and brand trust.

This applies to both big and small companies.

If you’re a startup who is new to distributing/selling, or even a larger organisation trying a new approach, getting it wrong can provide you with key insights, and an opportunity to improve. By learning those lessons, refine your approach towards building a better proposition and customer experience moving forward.

5. Here Are 3 Ways To FAIL At Building Trust (Avoid At All Costs…)

• Fail to embed your brand values and mission into your business, marketing, products and team
• Fail to live and breathe your mission and brand values
• Use the same brand strategy for every product

6. ‘It’s Not Good Enough to Build Great Products…’ Tom Price

As you can see in the points above, building great products will only get you so far (find out more about that on our Brand Trust Report). There is another element required, and that is to know in great detail who you’re building your product or service for, and to be clear about what value your proposition is adding to people’s lives, and how you are benefiting them.

Know your values and know what you’re contributing to the world around you. Stick to your mission and be authentic, with a solid structure throughout.

7. Startups Don’t Have To Be Perfect At First

We live in a world where everyone is waiting for perfection, but sadly, it doesn’t exist. Some people like to wait around forever before they hit the ‘go’ button towards achieving their goals.

At Attest, we believe in achieving a healthy balance of gathering enough information required to make the right decisions, followed by action. Knowledge followed by action is key, and so is refining your approach based on what you learned in the real world.

So when you launch new products, gather as much information as possible prior to launch, but be aware that iteration is a key part of product refinement and success. You’ll learn by studying, and you’ll learn by doing, so do both. Study, learn and do, and study, learn and do again.

Studying, learning and doing will teach you how to build powerful products, a strong customer journey, and refine how you speak to your customers. And it’s this combination of activity that will move you on your path towards building the trusted brand you desire.

Attest’s scaleable intelligence platform will help you to find answers to the above questions, and build brand trust in a much more powerful, accurate and rapid way.

If you missed the webinar and would like to watch it in full and learn more, click here.