Does Your Brand Care? - part 3: Reliability

This is part three of my blog series about the book “Does Your Brand Care?” by Isabel Verstraete. As a quick reminder: the CARE principles stand for collaboration, agility, reliability and empathy.

In this article, I’ll zoom in on the third pillar, reliability. Please continue reading to discover more about it.

Reliability and why you should care

Reliability is more than just the rational aspects of your product. It’s about being a respectful, trustworthy brand that values integrity and honesty. To build a trustworthy relationship you need to show and prove what you stand for, how you communicate openly and transparently and how you treat your staff. Trust is a factor people value most as highly as product benefits. People are looking at companies to be a trusted partner throughout their lives.

Keep up the hard work

Good to know: when you are a reliable and trustworthy company for your staff, clients, partners and community, you need to work hard to keep earning this trust and reliability. Here are some tips from the book as well as myself how to build and keep it:

• When you start and are a small company, you are more approachable. This way, you win trust; you’re there when needed. The advice here is not to stay small, but stay as approachable as you were as a small company. Have a customer success manager who can spend the time your customer requires to build up trust.
• Offer a good product and avoid over-processing; building trust. Don’t Photoshop your product. Show it as is. Ensure that the expectations arisen with your marketing story or sales talk are equal to the performance you offer afterwards. If not, the customer will be disappointed and tell everyone in their network, harming your brand reputation in the long term.
• Become more transparent, dare to say where you stand for today, communicate frankly and transparently.
• Ask for reviews, and take claims and complaints seriously. React openly to dissatisfied consumers.

I hope you enjoyed this third part. Curious about the last pillars of the CARE principle? My article about empathy will follow soon. Keep an eye on our website or subscribe to our RSS feed to get a notification once published.