How We Build Brand Reputation (Key Factors, Tips & Examples)

Many clients come to us because they want to improve their brand’s reputation. And with 30 years’ experience building and managing reputations for businesses across the UK and beyond, we’re proud to say that we’re experts at it.

But I’m afraid improving your reputation isn’t something that can be solved in a quick step-by-step guide. As how we go about doing it depends on a number of factors, including:

• How your company/brand is currently perceived
• What you want to be known for
• Why now – what you want to achieve from the brand building, as a business?
• The audience(s) that must be reached
• How your brand stacks up against its competition
• What those competitors are doing themselves
• What is currently being done on your marketing front, and the company’s internal resources
• The time frame – building a brand’s reputation takes time!
• The budget

So here’s an insight into the factors we consider when building a brand’s reputation, some top tips to help you achieve it, and a few examples of brands that have got it right.

If a company is new or has never done any brand building before, we’re potentially starting with a clean slate. Assuming there haven’t been any crises, there won’t be any misconceptions or reputational problems to unpick. This is helpful. But it also means there isn’t any goodwill or good marketing work to build on.

In other words, we’re starting from scratch.

Our unique brand love study has shown that we tend to love brands which fulfil one or more of three things, they:

• Fit with our lifestyles/working life
• Reinforce our self-image
• Have our values

These are true whether you’re a B2B or consumer brand. So we’ll need to work out which camp your brand falls into, as any brand reputation building strategy will need to be focused on this context.

When someone comes to us asking for help building their brand’s reputation, we always want to know why now? What is your company is trying to achieve – what is the business imperative that our work needs to help with? It could be that you’re:

• Struggling to differentiate yourself
• Worried your existing reputational activity is stale or not thought through
• Frustrated that inferior competitors seem better known
• Unable to convey your expertise/specialness
• Facing a new competitor who’s stealing your market share
• Targeting a new market
• Struggling to convert prospects to customers
• Have an exciting growth agenda
• Unable to attract the talent you need
• Readying their business for eventual sale
• Have just experienced a crisis which has damaged your reputation

Any of these answers will have a profound impact on the approach we take to brand building.

Your audience is almost everything to us. It’s absolutely central to all brand reputational work. We need to know who they are – their profile, traits, attitudes, needs and concerns. How they graze for information. How they search and buy, who influences them and who else affects their decision-making.

The answers matter. For one, they influence practical things like the media and social media channels we’ll need and the tactics we’ll use.

But audience understanding gives us far more than practical information. It provides an insight; the emotional triggers or concerns the audience is likely respond to. Things that could give our brand building resonance and cut through.

How a brand stacks up against its competitors gives us a sense of the scale of the task ahead of us, as well as the space the brand can perhaps occupy. For instance, if competitors are playing things very safe, all saying and doing the same things, (as is so often the case with B2B brands) there’s real scope to carve out a distinctive personality for the brand. That’s not saying the PR will trivialise things or be less serious, but it can be braver or more distinctive.

If a company has an extensive marketing team and plans already in place, or a strong brand personality, tone of voice and language, we’ll want to understand all of this. After all, we’re keen to capitalise and build on work that’s already been done, not waste a company’s precious marketing spend reinventing the wheel.

If a company has nothing in place or a small, very stretched marketing team, our work to improve their brand’s reputation might include a lot of bolt-on services – so that we can do a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

The surest sign that someone isn’t serious about their brand’s reputation is when they say they need a few months of PR. Really? This is typically a comment from companies that haven’t done any brand building before but have suddenly been told they need some.  Maybe they’ve just had a crisis, or they want to sell.

As my colleague so eloquently put it recently – PR isn’t like ER – you can’t suddenly turn to it when you have an urgent need and hope it will quickly patch up your reputation.

In fact, let me say this now – if you genuinely want to build your brand and you are a company that’s just been hit by a scandal, you’ll need to work on your brand reputation from now and forever. If you’re a company owner preparing your business for an exit, the brand building needs to start at least 3 years ahead of when you plan to sell and continue right up to the sale.

This is because brand building takes time – and every brand is a work in progress.

M&S has consistently developed its brand for over 140 years. No surprise it’s one of our best known, loved and trusted brands. Yet it knows its brand cannot be neglected as the recent cyber-attack proved. All those years of brand building had built up a huge font of good will, putting it in a strong position for the reputationally damaging crisis. But it knows it can’t rest on its brand laurels.

Like any capital asset, a brand needs attention, maintenance, protection, repair and investment. Constant building.

Improving your brand reputation takes a sustained effort often by skilled, creative people. That effort won’t come cheap. So, we have to know what budget a company has to work with. It will dictate how fast we can work, what’s possible – and whether we can do anything at all.

Armed with the answers to all these questions we’ll craft a brand building strategy. This will include:

• The insight to be leveraged
• The overarching message we’ll want to communicate
• How this might play out across the business
• The creative communications campaigns which will bring it to life
• The channels we’ll use
• How we’ll measure success

Brand reputation management isn’t a formulaic science. Even though there are lots of practical questions to be answered, what you do with the answers is a creative, often quite instinctive process.

And even if you come up with a good brand building strategy, it’s easy for it to be derailed. Companies can lose their nerve or focus.

That’s why our following tips are designed to prevent that from happening…

1. Be brave, be comfortable being different from your competitors (that doesn’t mean being whacky)
2. Be prepared for the long haul
3. Find the distinct audience insight that you can leverage – and then really go for it, wholeheartedly
4. Commit to a path – constant changing of approach and messaging dilutes efforts
5. Know where your brand fits – what it stands for, the role it plays in your customers’ lives or sense of identity. This is hard work, be prepared to go down a lot of wrong paths before you arrive at the answer. Once you know it, it’s much easier to make good brand decisions
6. Treat your brand reputation as your company’s most valuable asset. Make sure your board and finance function understand and respect its value and buy into it
7. Your sense of brand should be so strong that it leads decisions – not the other way round

Lego & Paddington – moving with the times

Building a toy brand is a massive balancing act. You must be fun and relevant from the child’s point of view but also fit with the parent/gift giver’s values, so that they feel comfortable – indeed positively excited – buying the toy for someone else.

And this balance must be achieved time and again, over many years. This means not only consistently living up to values but keeping them relevant for the modern era.

LEGO has done this brilliantly. The notion of ‘playing well’ – through imagination, fun and creativity – worked back in 1932 and can still be seen today in its ‘rebuild the world’ campaign which it is constantly investing in. The most recent iteration of this has seen the brand team up with actor Tom Holland, known for his iconic role as Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to send a powerful message to kids and families around the world: never stop playing.

Another evergreen favourite, Paddington, has also deftly held onto its long-held values – this time of kindness and generosity – refreshing them for each era. For instance, Paddington in 2017 became a champion for children’s rights for UNICEF. A tactic which will have resonated with those grandparents, who themselves loved Paddington when children in the 1950s.

Amazon – a life partner

If a brand is loved when it fits in with someone’s lifestyle then it is easy to see why tech giant Amazon is loved by so many. In the modern, home shopping era, where selection, having something in stock, at a good price and next day delivery really matter – Amazon is king. It’s become an essential adjunct to people’s lives.

However, it’s easy to forget that Amazon has spent years and invested heavily getting to this loved position. For instance, in its early days it might’ve seemed logical for Amazon to limit its product range to those high demand, big ticket items which generate the most profit. But Amazon recognised that people don’t buy these items every day. And it wanted to be such a big part of our daily lives that we would always turn to it. So, it stocked the low profit everyday items and spent heavily, ironing out the irritations which can come with online shopping.

Amazon consistently lost money for several years following this strategy. We can only imagine the pressure exerted by worried investors, seeing year after year of losses stack up. The temptation to dilute its brand purpose and focus on the money-making stuff must have been immense. But it’s latest net income figure for the twelve months ending September 30, 2025 of $76.482B, suggests this commitment to becoming the online consumer’s life partner has paid off.

Ikea & Timpson – brand values driving decisions

Ikea and Timpson, the shoe repair firm, both have absolute clarity about what they stand for and know this chimes with their customers. Their values are in-step, and this translates into everything they do as brands.

For example, conscious that their customers are increasingly expecting a better environmental performance from them, IKEA created disassembly guides for its biggest sellers. The idea being that consumers were encouraged to take their Ikea furniture with them when they move. These easy-to-use guides also meant people could more easily give or sell their old furniture on to others, as the furniture can be taken apart without damaging it. This development was based on a real understanding of the customer, their values, lifestyle and what they therefore want from IKEA products.

Timpson has different but equally strong brand values, and these are reflected in everything it does. For instance, Timpson’s approach is based on a culture of trust and kindness. But this isn’t a mission statement that’s stuck in a drawer and forgotten. The brand ‘does’ trust and kindness. A tenth of employees are ex-offenders and at least seven of the group’s 2,000-plus stores are run by people still serving their sentences, who are able to work under day release schemes. It’s also mindful of other groups struggling to find work, such as the long-term unemployed, offering a free suit cleaning service for the unemployed going to interviews who can’t afford the service.

Timpson does things like this because it believes business should be about making a difference, not just a profit. The business has a clear purpose and is completely authentic. It walks the talk, and its customers relate to this mindset and reward it with loyalty.

When the company’s CEO, James Timpson, posted a few years ago: “If you find our shops a bit short staffed this week, I’m sorry. We have a colleague benefit where you get an extra day off when your kids have their first day at school, so a number of colleagues are doing a very special job away from their shops!” it was met with widespread praise. One person summed things up when they said: “I love the work life balance and the general empathy from your company. Will make it a mission to find a Timpson before going anywhere else.”

This comment perfectly illustrates the power when a company truly understands its customers identity, values and lifestyle – and the brand acts accordingly, allowing the knowledge to shape not just marketing but business decisions. Success follows.

Need to build your brand reputation? With 30 years’ experience growing B2B and B2C brands, our experts can help. Get in touch at susannah@energypr.co.uk to get started.