Brand Reputation Is a Great Asset
Focusing on earnings above all is expensive
Writers on Medium, we know that we only get paid when members read our material. If you link it to venues off platform you may have readers but you do not get paid for their reads. Mentors on the platform explain that your concern in those cases is your brand. I do not get paid much from Medium but I write to serve others and out of the joy of writing. Nevertheless, being true to my brand is essential to me.
What company seeking to boost their own brand does not offer free samples of their products? I remember a former boss told us one time about the one item that is always on sale. Everyone needs it so stores offer it at a discount through sales or coupons to attract more customers. If you don’t feel you need it, trust me someone will explain to you how wrong you are. The product? Soap.
Customers never enter a store and just buy soap, they also get whatever else they need from toothpaste to food. Soap offered at a discount gets them into the store.
Your free and paid readers increase your brand and that is a good thing. If you have a large amount of non-paying readers off platform, doing your best is still never a bad policy. A truly bad policy is: “I am not getting paid for this gig, so I will do a less than excellent job.” Focusing on doing your best even for free does wonder for your stature.
All successful companies focus on brand reputation
Many years ago, I worked for an employment staffing agency. They sent me to work for a large international coffee and donut company based in Massachusetts, trust me you know the name. The supervisor told me that the corporation had a philosophy. Since they were so large, their vendor relationship policy was: one bad shipment and the vendor was dropped to the bottom of the list of suppliers.
Vendors understood they had to send their best products to that company because losing that account would have a huge dent in their profits.
So, for the donut chain and its vendors brand reputation was huge.
I also use this philosophy in my own work. If a company damages its brand to me, I drop them from the list of vendors immediately. I don’t care who it is.
If they go the extra mile for me, I will go the extra mile for them.
So it is always good to study situations where brand lost out and keep them in mind even in our writing.
Do your job!
My day job involves being an administrator/pastor of churches. In my faith, I live where I work. The alarm company technician would show up monthly unannounced at various times to test our alarm at one church. He was a real annoyance because he always arrived when I was either involved in something else or just eating breakfast before my day. Eventually, I got tired of his unannounced visits and had another company come in to see if it was worth my while to change services.
They looked over the alarm system and explained that I did not have one in the church. What I did have was a wire running along the ceiling with two parts. If a fire happened eventually the heat would melt the wires together and it would close an electrical circuit that would trigger the alarm bell in the rectory next door, not the church. The system would also alert the fire department. The cable was also painted probably years earlier which should never have happened and that obviously reduced the effectiveness of the heat sensing element in the wire. The alarm technician never inspected the wire.
I called the company and asked the supervisor to explain their failure. I said: “What happens if I have a fire and two people die in it. What do I say to the families and to the local TV news and newspaper out front.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “No one dies in church fires.”
I am the son of a newspaper reporter. The first news story in which my father’s name was published was . . .The Coconut Grove Disaster. It was one of the worst tragedies in the world and it was the impetus for many of the fire laws in every state in the United States as well as in other countries worldwide. A night club in Boston, a fire ravaged the place in minutes. Locked emergency exits and a main revolving door out front turned the popular restaurant into a death trap.
Our family heard my father’s account regularly. The company supervisor surely did not know that I was not the one to give such a casual answer.
I then replaced that company in that church. They were eventually bought out by a national corporation.
We can treat out customers any way we want
You may remember Blockbuster. A huge video rental service which is now reduced to about two stores nationally (literally). They had a problem charging customers large late fees and some states investigated the company over many complaints of this issue. In fact, the founder of Netflix began his company after Blockbuster charged him $40.00 for a late fee. When they were huge, they could do almost anything they wanted but this hurt their long term business. Just before that late fee news broke, I had to return some videos that apparently were late. They assessed a large amount and yelled at me in front of other customers. I still had to rent another video for a church group (yes we were licensed) but was going to return it the next day. So, I paid the late fee and rented the new video.
The following day, I returned to the store with the rented video. I called the manager over and stood in front of the day employee at the cash register. In front of the manager, other customers and the employee, I returned my Blockbuster card explaining that I was accused of being a thief, yelled at by the previous employee and that I wanted nothing to do with Blockbuster again.
I left the store. Several weeks later, I saw that it was closed. Again, they destroyed their brand in my mind and others as well. What did them in? Several factors but one was large late fees and the attitude of the employees over them. This tarnished their brand.
Other companies get it.
When the COVID-19 shutdown happened, obviously many people were out of work. Some parishioners came forward and decided to put together a food pantry and they asked if I would contact certain food related businesses in the area. Star Market, Stop and Shop the two local grocers to our area were of great assistance. Another company we contacted was Teddie Peanut Butter located a few miles from where I am sitting right now. A couple days later, two cases arrived at our front door from Teddie. Harvard University, which surrounds us, also helped us with a grant and Boston College helped us with food as well as the City of Boston and a local community organization Charlesview. Just recently, the local Brighton, MA Marine Hospital helped us out too.
All of these organizations came forward and I would go the extra mile for them for what they did for our food pantry.
If we focus on just making money and do not realize that helping our brand is also key, we may miss an opportunity to establish our work or we may lose a future opportunity because we did not understand how much establishing our brand is essential. Just ask those who watch business trends.
Source on blockbuster history:
https://www.fastcompany.com/1690654/blockbuster-bankruptcy-decade-decline