How Many Issues Does It Take to Damage Your Brand?

Mistakes happen all the time – in life, in business – and learning from these in any situation can prevent them from happening again and allow you to turn them into the most positive experience possible. In business, with all eyes watching, though, some of these mistakes might not be as easily forgotten as you would like.

Naturally, this depends on the severity of the mistake, something that goes along with the question of when something becomes a pattern. Expecting to learn through experience is something but it’s also important to understand that you don’t have an unlimited amount of leeway here – the reputation of your brand may well suffer over time if similar errors in judgment are made.

Look to Examples

There’s not going to be a definitive, numerical answer to this initial question, but you can get a good sense of what the answer might be by looking at examples. In some cases, early mistakes can be overshadowed by higher levels of success down the line. Juul could be thought of as an example of this in some regards, with that success then becoming overshadowed by later controversy in another flip of the coin. You’re never safe from that kind of fall, no matter how much success you find, meaning that you have to work hard to put your best foot forward and keep yourself in the good graces of your audience.

Think of Everything

While perhaps an unreasonable demand, an obvious, easily avoidable problem will look much worse than a freak accident that was arguably out of your control. Take the packaging, for example. If you’re finding that a lot of your products aren’t making it to their destination safely, you might examine the way that they’re being shipped. However, if you’re aware that you’re shipping something fragile, such as engines, you might be expected to have been aware of that before it became a problem and found a suitable solution – using professionals like shiply.com who may specialize in relevant areas.

Your business isn’t just about your product; it’s also about everything surrounding that product. Some of these judgments might have been made through your own estimations of what your product entails, but it could also be that by examining gaps in how your competitors do things, you’re able to realize where to strike.

Responding to the Situation

When something goes badly, it’s understandable that you would want to set the record straight immediately, but this might mean that you run in without a level head or a good idea of what you should say. It’s something that needs to tow a fine line – you want to work with the right people to ensure that your response doesn’t make the situation worse, but you also don’t want it to come across as a tone-deaf statement that ignores the problem at hand. There is a very real risk of alienating your audiences further in your response, making it something that you need to think about thoroughly, gaining multiple perspectives on before committing to it.