In episode 105, Matt DeCoursey and Matt Wattson went full circle on the importance of company branding and the 10 ways that companies can easily ruin their brands.
What is a Brand?
The Matts started with first describing what a brand is.
- Apple is an example of a company brand.
- There’s also a personal brand – e.g. Matt DeCoursey brand, a Matt Watson brand.
- Basically, a brand encompasses your name, identity, other people’s perception of you.
10 Things that will Ruin your Brand
- Treat your customers poorly – examples: leaving frustrated customers hanging when they call for support and treating them in an arrogant, patronizing manner.
- Talking about politics, race or religion – sometimes you can throw in sex, too (think of those who got involved in the “Me, too” movement).
- Not engaged on social media – if you want to engage with your customers, then make sure to assign someone to monitor your social media presence.
- Breaking promises and lying to your paying customers – purely being deceitful to your customers
- Attempting to profit from worldly disasters – a strong example is when companies advertise portions of the proceeds to help disaster victims but could actually have been misused.
- Acting before thinking – basically anything from responding to your customers to feeding trolls or negative PR.
- Sending negative or subliminal messages – your reputation is shaped by so many factors, including the communication you deliver and the people you surround yourself with each day. Sometimes, the company or brand didn’t do anything wrong, but the people they’re associating with will drag them down.
- Negative attention from an employee – it’s when employees get a lot of negative attention, it’s not necessarily something that the employer did.
- Offering a poor website experience – imagine how many customers would get frustrated if it takes them too long to access a website. Also, inadequately describing what you do, listing a whole bunch of features and not the benefits of what your company does, or uploading outdated stuff such as outdated videos.
- Taking too long to explain what you do – if you can’t explain what you do in a sentence or two, how does “word-of-mouth” work for you? When talking to someone about your business, trim it down so your audience doesn’t get annoyed at you.
Other Notes:
- If you need someone to show the ropes to success in building the startup, we recommend you talk to startup experts such as Matt DeCoursey and Matt Watson, CEOs at Full Scale. Contact us to have your free consultation today.
- For questions or assistance on how to diagnose, improve and accelerate your website’s performance, Stackify provides affordable APM (Application Performance Management) solutions designed for developers.
- Scroll down to get the complete this episode’s transcript.
Listen to Episode 105 of the Startup Hustle podcast – 10 Ways to Ruin your Brand
