Did you know that the highest-performing and most profitable brands deliver on their promises 75% of the time? And this feeds into brand integrity. Maintaining brand integrity requires ensuring your company’s actions and messaging reflect its values and promises. It is the foundation of its reputation and impacts how consumers perceive and interact with the business. It allows you to build trust with your customers and increase customer loyalty. Here are some tips for building and maintaining business brand integrity.
1. Always choose the right products
It’s important to always invest in high-quality, especially in a competitive market. Various studies have shown how customers associate product quality with brand integrity. The better your products are, the higher your customers and prospects will regard your business. And you need to maintain this quality in every aspect of your business, including the promotional items you choose. This will go a long way towards creating a consistent message towards key stakeholders. So, if your business is into producing high-end products and services, choose promotional products with similar quality.
2. Let your brand stand out with excellent customer experience
Some studies show that 41% of customers agree that customer service strongly influences their trust in an organisation. Such customers must trust a company’s customer service before considering doing business with them. They want to know they can count on you whenever they need assistance or make enquiries, so feel free to consider this. Excellent customer service also means valuing your customer’s time, providing resourceful and knowledgeable services, having a pleasant attitude, and exceeding customer expectations.
3. Invest only in realistic marketing strategies
Engaging in reckless marketing strategies can come back and haunt your business in terms of brand image and integrity. To be clear, examples of reckless marketing strategies include not speaking the right language, not respecting your target customer’s intelligence, making unrealistic promises, selling products or services you cannot deliver, and so on. It’s easy to yield to the temptation of jumping onto the hype train and exaggerating your products or services when rolling them out. While it may work to draw the attention your brand needs, you will find it difficult to restore your integrity if customers realise that you only made promises you couldn’t keep. Present your offerings as they are, highlighting their benefits for your target buyer.
4. Maintain a consistent moral code
It’s not uncommon to find businesses, even startups, playing dirty to increase profit margins, including engaging in bribery, tax fraud, etc. And while some businesses get away with such practices, you will quickly look dirty in the eyes of your target customers. And this can easily destroy your credibility and integrity as a business, discouraging prospects and potential business partners from investing in your company. Maintaining a consistent moral code and avoiding any form of corporate fraud is the best way forward. And if any staff member has participated in bribery or other types of corporate fraud, you can rely on experienced corporate fraud lawyers to tackle the issue and help restore your business integrity.
