Breaking Your Brand – Brand Buzz

Can we learn a valuable lesson from what happened to Lance Armstrong and Manti Te'o and apply it to branding?  According to Jaci Russo, you can.  She stopped by the Afternoon Drive Home to talk about how easy it is to break your brand and how hard it is to rebuild it.

Russo talked about how the situation in both cases involved broken trust.  She said,

If you say, here's the promise.  This is what the experience is going to be from our product or our service.  And I get that experience just as you promised it or even better, and it's consistently delivered that way.  Then I become loyal because I know you're going to give me exactly what you keep telling me you're going to give me.

Russo said that loyalty breeds trust and that turns customers into advocates.  When you lose someone that is loyal, that makes it harder to rebuild the brand.  Russo did say that you need to be proactive when things happen.  She said that people are forgiving, but only if you own up to it rather than having it come from someone else.

Check out the complete conversation with Jaci Russo below: