Monitoring Marketing Sources of Brand Reputation Risk

Executives consistently rank brand reputation risk among the top three overall risk challenges facing their businesses. This risk is the possible damage to a brand’s overall standing, stature and esteem that derives from negative signals regarding the brand.

Successful brand stewardship requires ongoing tracking and monitoring of four marketing-strategy-related sources of reputational risks to brands: brand architecture strategies, digital marketing strategies, person-brand strategies and corporate socio-political activism. The authors provide ideas for metrics that a dashboard to manage brand reputation risk might contain. From the analysis of monitoring data, brands can, among other things, assess the level of severity of a specific brand reputation risk issue, the frequency of certain types of events, alternate response scenarios and the effectiveness of their actions.