Why building a strong brand reputation comes down to quality control
Building your brand’s credibility requires more than just great content. Here’s why prioritising quality control and vigilance around processes at every stage of production is an essential way for your comms team to win over audiences.
Your team works hard to maintain a credible reputation. After all, if your output is not consistently reliable, audiences will have no reason to trust your company’s services – and they’ll find what they’re looking for in the arms of a more dependable brand.
While building an iron-clad reputation can take years, just one slip in your editorial processes could be all it takes to mar the name you’ve made for your brand. Cue shattered integrity, disappointed stakeholders – and a dwindling audience.
Obviously, avoiding reputation catastrophe is a priority for any hardworking company. This is where quality control comes in. You might think this is already a priority area for your team – but in the daily hustle and bustle of any operation, mistakes can crop up.
Look at Twitter, which drew headlines for all the wrong reasons last year. Touting issues of “extreme levels of data scraping” and so-called “system manipulation” by account holders, the company placed a temporary limit on the number of tweets users could view each day – without warning. An absence of quality-controlled communications left its customers bewildered – and its reputation on thin ice.
The restrictions may have only lasted a couple of days, but the damage they caused to the user experience was enough to draw global attention to Meta’s shiny new rival platform. In contrast to the chaotic approach taken at Twitter, Threads launched with clearly outlined aims, features and future ambitions, signifying a more robust approach to its processes that helped the platform rake in more than 100 million users within days.
Processes, processes, processes
Quality control cannot simply be a tick-box exercise or an afterthought to close out a task. It is an essential part of brand reputation management – and it’s vital that quality-focused measures accompany every stage of your comms output.
At Speak, for example, we ensure that any new project is planned and set up with robust briefing documents. These templates help team members and stakeholders have crystal clarity on what is being delivered and what is expected from everyone involved before the work begins. (It’s also a great excuse to set up a colour-coordinated Gantt chart.)
When a project is underway, quality control is about multi-stage editing processes. With several team members on hand to check and double-check that the content fits the brief, delivers to the client’s expectations and is factual, accurate and clear – the chances of facing a reputation meltdown become slim to none.
An established approach to stakeholder review will also help to ensure that mistakes don’t creep in during amends stages. Not only that, but clear and consistent communication throughout a project will also strengthen your client relationships. Everyone you work with will recognise the stand-out quality of your team’s approach, processes and output – which can only be a plus for your brand’s reputation.
Retaining audience trust
The Irish Times faced a credibility crash when it had to apologise for publishing a ‘hoax’ article that had been generated using AI.
Commenting on the mistake, the paper wrote: “The incident has highlighted a gap in our pre-publication procedures. We need to make them more robust – and we will.” But the mishap had already resulted in “a breach of the trust between The Irish Times and its readers”.
Audience trust is difficult to build and easy to break. That’s why staying vigilant to processes that establish and maintain quality is key to the foundation of any strong brand.
By taking steps to ensure that quality control guides every stage of your team’s content production, from briefing to review, your brand’s reputation will have nowhere to go but up.
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Want to find out how to implement a best-in-class editorial strategy that connects your organisation to your always-on audience? Contact Gabrielle from our client services team at gabriellebridle@speakmedia.co.uk or on LinkedIn.