By Felicia Knight
Corporate image building, whether or not you’re in the Fortune 500, is paramount to the success of your company. That’s obvious. What might not be as apparent is that your business’s image can be influenced by factors as random as what your employees post on social media, the the use of ad blockers and those unforeseen “Jared”-type incidents.
Writing for the Huffington Post, Ira Kalb, Assistant Professor of Clinical Marketing at the University of California’s Marshall School of Business, explains that corporate image building is crucial to your company’s success because:
“It governs the way the rest of the world thinks about you. The right image creates a bond of trust between you and the marketplace, enables you to achieve your goals, and boost your earnings. The wrong one can block attainment of your goals and deplete your bank account.”
Kalb outlines six steps that will help you create a strong identity for your business, including one of the Knight Canney Group’s favorites: creating a mission statement. A mission statement forces you to define your company’s goals, how you interact with your customers, and the tenets of your service. It also serves as your 30-second elevator pitch.
Much has been written about employees damaging their company’s (and their own) image by posting inappropriate pictures, rants, and company secrets. And Subway’s Jared Fogle scandal again raised awareness of the perils of relying on a perhaps not fully-vetted spokesperson carrying your message and your image. In both of these examples, the resulting crisis management scenarios are what kept business owners up at night, and what kept PR firms employed.
When it comes to the corporate messages that you can control – well, those are in jeopardy as well. The latest hurdle is ad-blocking software now used by 22% of smartphone users around the world. In the U.S. alone, there are four dozen ad-blocking browsers from which to choose. Yes, ad blockers speed up the downloading of websites, but – well – they block your ads. No ads, no image, no messaging, no más.
Integrating corporate messaging into content (not unlike what we’re about to do in this blog) is one solution. It allows you to craft your PR message to your audience – your customers – and present that message in a welcoming environment. The Knight Canney Group would be happy to help you with that component.
Corporate image building: not always easy, but always crucial.