The relationship between reputation and brand equity
Launch library · evergreen read
Brand equity is often described in terms of awareness and preference, but reputation is what underwrites both. An audience that trusts how an organisation behaves will extend more benefit of the doubt to its marketing, while an audience that distrusts its conduct will discount even well crafted campaigns.
Reputation accumulates from actions the audience observes directly or hears about from others, not from the brand's own messaging about itself. This is why reputation moves more slowly than a campaign and why damage to it cannot simply be advertised away once trust has been lost.
Treating reputation and brand equity as separate workstreams, one for communications and one for conduct, misses how tightly linked they are. The organisations that protect brand equity most effectively tend to be the ones that treat reputation as the foundation the brand is built on, not a separate concern.
This relationship becomes most visible under pressure. A brand with strong underlying reputation can absorb a difficult period more easily than a brand whose equity rests mainly on advertising spend, because the goodwill audiences extend in a crisis is drawn from the reputation built long before the crisis began.