Building Brand Takes Time

The name of the McKenzie Worldwide blog is “Brand Trust Visions” and that name was created after much discussion. If it’s truly our mantra, then we obviously must feel that building brand is very important for companies of all sizes. However, it’s also a term that can mean many things to many people. For this discussion we’ll focus on the idea of “brand trust” which, according to Wikipedia, is about creating “…the foundation of a strong brand connect with all stakeholders, converting simple awareness to strong commitment.”

For consumer products, like Coca Cola, creating their brand awareness comes from word-of-mouth and a truckload of advertising. For television shows like Lost, DM News editor Elyse Dupre says it’s important to leave consumers wanting more. She goes on to say that creating a sense of community, by providing a place “where consumers can talk about their brand freely”, such as an online chat room, goes a long way toward building trust among customers and potential customers.

But building trust and a strong brand image for technology companies can be tricky. For instance, Gatorade or Red Bull are consumer goods that you can touch and taste and have qualities that can be measured and a coolness factor that, frankly, can’t be measured. But what about technology vendors? How can a cloud storage vendor build its brand when their offering isn’t tangible?

One way for technology companies to help build their brand is by leveraging happy customers and turning them into what we like to call brand ambassadors. Whether it’s writing about your customers on your company blog, as e-Spirit did with customers Geberit and Hamburd Süd, or jointly delivering a presentation at an industry trade show with one of your customers, the ultimate goal is to transform new and existing customers into enthusiastic brand ambassadors. How do you do this? Well, e-Spirit discussed this concept in an article (which we helped them write) that appeared in CMSWire titled Turn Touch Points into Trust Points.

Here are three steps that were discussed in the article:

• Integrate website content with your e-commerce site
• Help your content creators do their job
• Get personal, but don’t stalk

Those are just three ideas about how to build brand but they’re important to a Web Content Management System vendor like e-Spirit.

How’s your company’s brand trust level? We’d love to help you build more trust in your brand…which is always a good thing.

Author: Rob Goodman

Rob Goodman is a communications professional with more than 27 years of experience in public relations, marketing and content creation.