The type of brand loyalty that leads customers to rush to the stores on day one for a new product is hard to come by. It’s also extremely profitable. Stanley experienced a 751% year-over-year increase (no, that’s not a typo!) in its tumbler sales in 2022. Talk about results that justify a marketing budget.

Stanley’s breakout story isn’t a trajectory most retailers can hope to mimic. But it is a success story we can all learn from. The secret sauce isn’t a colorful 40-oz tumbler — it’s in the brand equity that Stanley built among its loyal customers. 

This guide will help you understand what brand equity means, how you can build it, and how to handle brand challenges that many retailers face. 

Chapters:

1. What is brand equity?
2. What goes into brand equity?
3. The importance of brand equity
4. How to create brand equity through the consumer experience
5. How to measure brand equity
6. Solving brand equity challenges
7. Every company has a brand equity journey

What is brand equity?

Brand equity is the value attached to a certain brand name. It’s a combination of brand awareness and brand reputation, and maintaining both is essential for companies of all sizes.  

In practice, brand equity measures customer loyalty. It helps you understand how much more your consumers are willing to pay for your products, how likely they are to choose you over a competitor, and whether they’ll consider trying completely new products or services from you. 

Sound simple? It is. The hard part is building it. 

What goes into brand equity?

As a whole, brand equity is intangible. It’s based on consumers’ perceptions and emotions, which means it can be hard to measure. However, there’s a few elements that strong brand equity is built from.

The first is brand awareness. Awareness, in this case, doesn’t mean whether people have heard of your company. It means what they know about your products, the things you stand for, and the benefits you offer your customers. The value of your brand depends on consumers’ understanding of your purpose.

The second is brand perception. This might seem similar to brand awareness, but perception is born in your customers’ minds. It’s what your brand represents to them. For instance, Stanley sees its core values as “invention, innovation and inspiration” and its purpose as “build[ing] a more sustainable, less disposable life and world.” However, to its current fans, Stanley Tumblers are about staying hydrated (if you #WaterTok, you know) while making a fashion statement. They perceive Stanley as a status symbol, whether the brand is meant to be one or not.

Third, we have brand associations. These are the concepts and feelings consumers attach to your brand. Think of your car. You likely equate it with the freedom to go where you want. Depending on the type of car you have, you may also consider it a leader in safety features or a way to save money and the planet by reducing your gasoline use. If you’re like most consumers, you ascribe those specific feelings to the car brand. (This can work the other way, too, if you really hate your car.) Those would be your associations. 

Fourth comes perceptive quality. As the name suggests, this is a measure of how consumers feel about the standard of goods or services they’ll receive from a brand. Perceptive quality doesn’t need to be based on personal experience. Consumers may make quality assumptions based on price point or the selection of stores that carry a brand or product. They may also form their opinions from word-of-mouth or marketing campaigns. 

Fifth is brand experience. This is the part where customers interact with your products or services — and yes, it really is fifth on the list! However, brand experience is still an important part because it’s where their impressions of your brand can be proven true or false. 

The sixth is brand loyalty. This is your customers’ decision to keep interacting with your brand. For some, brand loyalty means continually rebuying consumable products. Brands that make durable goods may instead measure loyalty through customers’ engagement with social media or newsletter content. The most loyal customers will try other products from your brand and recommend you to friends and family. 

Together, these six components add up to a perception and experience of brand value among your customers. 

The importance of brand equity

It’s hard to overstate the value of brand equity because there are so many ways you’ll see positive ROI if yours is strong. 

On the customer level, you’ll find it easier to attract new buyers because they’ll know your products or services are of high quality. A company with high brand equity also finds retention easier since equity includes trust — and trust is a factor in over 90% of consumers’ buying choices. 

When it comes to profitability, brand equity allows you to charge more than competitors without losing your customers. It helps you increase your sales volume as brand advocates share their love for your products with friends.

Plus, brands with a high level of trust can be more efficient with their marketing spend. Customers who already know and trust your brand don’t need nearly as much enticement to buy. Between a decrease in spending and an increase in prices, your company will see higher profit margins overall.

Brand equity matters because it increases your market share over competitors. It makes it easier to expand into new products or verticals because you have a base of buyers who are willing to try out a new product. And, for publicly traded companies, brand equity increases your stock price.

Brand equity is sort of like money: The more you have, the better off your company is. You might even argue it’s a type of currency in its own right — the currency of trust.

How to create brand equity through the consumer experience

Look up “how to create brand equity,” and you’ll get a laundry list of action items — be consistent in your branding! Run the right kind of marketing campaigns! Make good products! But brand equity can’t be built in a vacuum. It’s a relationship between you and your consumer base. It’s, therefore, best to start from the consumer perspective.

Consumers go through a journey with each brand that either ends in them valuing the product or deciding they want to try something new. Here are the five steps you must lead your buyers through to develop brand equity. 

1. Awareness

Brand awareness is the top element of brand equity, and it’s also the first step in each consumer’s journey. They have to know who you are, what you do, and what you stand for. 

Advertising is typically the best way to introduce yourself to new customers. But awareness marketing can’t just include the name of your brand and a picture of your product or a description of your services. If you’re unknown to a consumer, they need a reason to care about you. 

A strong brand story can help you break through the noise with your awareness campaign. The best awareness campaigns cater to the values or interests of your target demographic. For instance, if your buyers care about supporting small businesses, your ads might emphasize that your products started from a home recipe. If they’re nature lovers, talk about your company’s sustainability efforts while showing how your product will help them enjoy the great outdoors. 

Awareness campaigns are often easier to disseminate through mass or social media. PPC ads keyed on your brand name won’t be reaching new potential buyers. You’ll need to identify the spaces where your target audiences hang out and then go to them there. Maybe that means buying ads in publications centered around a certain topic.

Or maybe it means encouraging your existing fans to share user-generated content (UGC), such as reviews and media your customers create about or featuring your brand. UGC can be reshared by your brand, but it also spreads organically through the networks and communities you want to reach. 

2. Recognition

Once customers know who you are, you want them to start seeing your product around. The familiarity will help build trust and cement you in their mind as an option.

Building recognition requires you to focus on brand consistency. Consumers expect a certain uniformity in aesthetics — that’s your logo, fonts, colors, and other design elements — to help them quickly identify brands. Depending on how your product is presented, you might consider appealing to other senses. You know exactly what that Slack “new message” sound is, thanks to consistent branding. 

Consumers are also more likely to recognize your brand or product when they routinely encounter it in the same context. You can use that context to start building associations. For instance, a product that’s consistently shelved with premium goods will come across as a quality item. One that’s mentioned in buzzy publications will seem on-trend to consumers. 

The techniques you use for recognition are similar to those you use to build awareness. But you shouldn’t think of the two as interchangeable. Your goal in the awareness step was to get your name and story out there. When you’re building recognition, you have the chance to go deeper into your story and cement your values, mission, and desired preconceptions in your audience’s mind. 

3. Trial

After a consumer gets to know your brand, those who find it intriguing will move to step three: trialing your product or services.

You typically have one chance to impress a new consumer (unless you’ve done an extremely good job in steps one and two!), so delivering on your promises in short order is of the utmost importance. 

First, the recognizability must be there. If buyers have only ever seen your product in photos and videos, the item they receive has to match. (If they’re picking it up on a store shelf, you can assume you’ve succeeded on this point.)

Second, your product must be of the expected quality. It doesn’t need to be the best on the market, but it should meet or exceed the standards for the price point and perform as you’ve stated it will. 

Third, users must find your product memorable. Whether that’s because it introduces a new and fun way to address an old problem or just because it looks different than competitors, there has to be something about it that sticks in their heads.

Keep in mind that the physical product is only part of the equation here. If the trial stage is about your company delivering on its promises, it’s your job to craft guarantees your product can easily meet. Set your company up for success by guiding your buyers’ expectations through advertising, product copy, or post-purchase communications. You may want to test this messaging with focus groups or survey customers to learn where you’re hitting the mark and where you can be more accurate or specific. 

4. Preference 

The number of customers who choose your product over others is an indicator of brand equity. You can earn your customers’ preference by providing an excellent brand experience.

Make sure your buyers are getting the most out of your product with tutorials, user guides, or inspiration. More complex or technical products are more likely to call for the first two; we trust you can figure out if a user guide would be helpful to your audience. 

For items that don’t need a how-to, you might instead show suggested uses. This is another place where UGC works well. For instance, apparel sellers might share ‘fit inspiration to help buyers style their new clothes. Or, help customers think outside the box by offering some “hacks” that repurpose your product for unexpected uses. There’s a whole community centered around stretching the use cases for Ikea furniture; if your devoted users have similarly clever tips, don’t be afraid to share.

Keep in mind that your customers’ experiences go beyond their interactions with your product. Every interaction with your company matters — whether that’s the emails they open (useless or worth reading?), their visits to your website (is there an annoying modal in the way?), or communications with customer service (nobody likes those AI chatbots. Nobody.).

Make sure you’ve optimized the digital experience so interacting with your company is simple. You should also use proactive customer service to make your users feel like they’re real VIPs. 

5. Loyalty

You’ve succeeded in building brand equity with a consumer when they convert from a sometimes-buyer to a loyal customer. Loyalty may seem like the natural outcome of the previous steps of the journey, and you certainly can’t earn it without focusing on them as well. However, you can also nudge customers into becoming more loyal. 

Keep customers around by following through on the experience-building work you did previously. A buyer’s seventh purchase should be just as valuable and enjoyable as the first. Therefore, your efforts to engage customers with your product and brand can’t stop after that first W. Treat each new purchase as an opportunity to engage them more with your brand story and values, and make your product even more central to their life.

Beyond that, you can build brand loyalty in two ways. The first is by building a community around your brand. If you don’t have your own platform to bring people together, create a hashtag for users to share related content on their socials. This is where resharing UGC can be a big boon; customers love to see their content endorsed by an official brand account. 

If a community isn’t a viable option, try a loyalty rewards program. There’s multiple ways to structure a loyalty program. You can offer discounts, exclusive or early access to new products, or perks like free shipping or birthday rewards. Just getting people to enroll in a loyalty program makes them 30% more likely to increase their spending with you. If you can talk them into paying for it, they’re 60% more likely to drop more on your products. 

Loyalty matters because it’s cyclical. Once someone starts thinking of themself as a loyal customer, they’ll start acting more loyal, reinforcing their perception. The more value they get from your brand, the more value they’ll perceive it as having.  

How to measure brand equity

There’s not a brand equity meter you can access to measure how much consumers value your company and its products. You can, however, gather internal benchmarks for related metrics within a few categories:

• Financial “big picture” numbers like market share and company value
• Financial “small picture” figures like price growth and sensitivity, revenue potential, and purchasing frequency
• Sentiment measurements from web analytics, online engagement statistics, reviews, focus groups, and surveys
• Customer metrics like loyalty program participation, purchase frequency, and retention

The valuation and strength of your brand depend on your brand equity. Watch for fluctuations in any of the metrics your company uses to track these two KPIs, along with those listed above. 

You’ll have to rely on your judgment to determine whether a change in one number reflects a change in brand equity or whether it’s a response to other factors. If you see growth or declines across the board, though, you’re likely seeing the impact of your brand equity efforts. 

Solving brand equity challenges

Brand equity, like the stock market, can go up and down. All companies face challenges (whether from internal or external factors) that decrease the perceived value of their brands. If you’re not already performing regular brand reputation maintenance, it’s time to draw up a program. Then, get ahead of these hardships with our playbooks for some common obstacles. 

Crowdsourced brand information

Brands largely controlled their image when mass media was dominant; now, consumers can get their information anywhere. Customers who detail negative brand experiences online can drive away potential buyers and pollute your brand’s image.

Negative reviews from customers who just enjoy yelling about things are part of life — every Swiftie knows that the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. You should start worrying when those bad reviews start to outnumber the good ones or customers share stories outrageous enough to go viral. 

Prepare yourself by learning how to respond to bad reviews (tl;dr: quickly, briefly, and with empathy) so you can step in when a customer is unhappy. You’ll hopefully improve their experience and show shoppers your company cares about making things right. 

Failure to deliver on promises

Customers expect good value in return for their money. What defines “value” will vary based on the individual and type of product, but they’ll know when a product isn’t up to snuff. For instance, if a phone’s battery keeps catching fire until that phone gets banned from commercial flights, you’re probably not meeting expectations.

Most products don’t have this big of an expectations-reality mismatch, but you may face a disconnect between the product your company announced and the product it was able to create. When you learn customers aren’t having the experience you thought they would, it’s time to shift your messaging. 

There may not be a lot you can do to reach those who have already bought the hyped-up version of a product except offer refunds. But you should adjust your future marketing pitch so your next crop of buyers knows what they’re getting. 

Breaches of customer trust

People make mistakes, including people who are on the job. When those mistakes affect your customers, you may see a large decrease in brand equity.

A 2023 survey by PwC found that protecting consumer data is essential to earning trust — so hacks or other data breaches will harm your customer relationships big time. AI use is also shaping up as a trust-breaking practice for some companies.

38% of customers stop purchasing from a brand altogether after that brand damages their trust. The others will need some reassurance that your company understands the problem, takes it seriously, and is coming up with a plan to prevent further issues. Your exact approach will vary based on the incident that sparked the outrage, but as in the other cases, communicating with empathy and a genuine desire to make things right can help salvage your image.  

Every company has a brand equity journey

It takes time for customers to see your brand as a valuable part of their lives. It will take time to build that perception of value, too. You’ll likely see ups and downs during the process, and you may learn about some problems you didn’t even know existed. 

Don’t let these roadblocks deter you, and don’t feel down if you don’t get results overnight. Think about the brands you trust completely — how many months or years did it take for them to win you over? You’ll be starting at the same place with your customers, so have patience. Things will start to change as you follow the steps laid out in this article. 

One last tip: Keep yourself motivated by breaking your grand plan into small, concrete steps. The first thing you can do now — today! — is to take control of your brand communications. It’s an easy starting place, and it will set the foundation for more important work you’ll have to do later. Read our complete guide to ensuring brand consistency across channels to get started.

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Because creating every piece of content from scratch isn’t always a feasible option, especially if you’re working with limited time and budget. Even if one of your teammates is an eight-armed octopus, easy access to plenty of authentic, fresh, and relatable branded content isn’t the reality for most companies.

What is a content curation tool?

A content curation tool is an application that makes it easier for your brand to find and share relevant, authentic content.

Content curation — sharing content from other sources on your own channels — is an ideal solution for this conundrum. But this strategy goes beyond just reposting great content. It involves finding, organizing, and sharing the best and most appropriate bits in a way that adds value to your brand narrative and engages your audience.

Best content curation tools to refine your digital e-commerce strategy

Let’s look at 12 of the best content curation tools that will help you get the job done successfully — in no particular order.

1. Feedly

• Specialty: Trend monitoring and industry insights
• Top features: AI-driven content curation and powerful organizational tools for feeds and boards
• Pricing: Pro: $6/month and Pro+: $8.25/month. Enterprise plans are available upon request

Feedly offers an AI-powered platform that filters and prioritizes content from a diverse range of online sources, including blogs, news sites, YouTube channels, and more. The tool adapts to your content curation preferences over time, so the more you use it, the more tailored your content feed becomes. This level of personalization allows you to stay ahead of trends and keep a finger on the pulse of what’s relevant to your audience.

With customizable news feeds and the ability to organize content into collections, Feedly becomes a centralized hub for all your curated content, that you can then pull from to add your own perspective.

2. ContentGems

• Specialty: Automated content curation and distribution
• Top features: Intelligent content filtering based on interests and keywords and integration with social media for easy sharing
• Pricing: A free version is available. Other plans include Pro: $10/month, Premium: $99/month, and API: $299/month

Much like other content curation tools, ContentGems uses keywords, social signals, and other filters to help you find relevant content. The tool’s standout feature is Workflows — with ContentGems, you can create customized workflows that let you share your favorite pieces of curated content with your audience, whether that’s through your social networks or an email newsletter. 

Adding your brand’s personal twist (an opinion, a clever twist, or relevant insights) is a key step in content curation. ContentGems knows this, and the Workflows feature allows you to include whatever context you wish to the content prior to sharing.

3. Flipboard

• Specialty: Engaging visual content aggregation and personalization
• Top features: Custom magazine-style layouts for content, smart content discovery with personalized recommendations, and social sharing capabilities
• Pricing: Free

Flipboard stands out for its unique magazine-style interface, which allows you to create personalized “magazines” or collections of articles, photos, and videos. This visually engaging format makes it easy for you to navigate and discover content that resonates with your audience and aligns with your brand voice. Plus, it’s completely free!

With Flipboard, you can follow topics, influencers, or even specific publications, ensuring you have a diverse and comprehensive stream of content at your disposal. This content can also serve as inspiration for marketing campaigns, social media content, and even product development, making Flipboard a versatile tool in the arsenal of any e-commerce manager and digital marketer.

4. Scoop.it

• Specialty: Efficient content discovery and knowledge sharing
• Top features: Robust content suggestion engine based on your selected topics, easy integration with social media and blogging platforms, and analytics to track engagement
• Pricing: A free version with limited features is available. Pro: $14.99/month and Plus: $67/month. Enterprise plans are available upon request

Scoop.it provides a platform where you can find relevant content across the web, organize, and share it with ease. You start by creating topic-specific pages, where the different types of content (articles, images, and videos) will live. 

Scoop.it’s advanced content suggestion engine then scours the internet for content based on these chosen topics, delivering a curated selection of high-quality content. The tool also lets you share knowledge internally, so all team members can contribute to amplifying the amount of curated content available to share on your marketing channels.

5. Buzzsumo

• Specialty: Real-time insights into what content types and topics generate the most engagement
• Top features: Tools for finding key influencers in your industry and alerts for brand mentions or keywords
• Pricing: Content Creation: $199/month, PR&Comms: $299/month, Suite: $499/month and Enterprise: $999/month

Ensuring that your content curation strikes a chord with your audience is key — a tool like Buzzsumo is an ally in this regard. It allows you to search for the most shared and engaging content on social media platforms based on keywords, hashtags, topics, or domains, providing a clear view of what’s trending and what’s not. Based on these insights, you can prioritize which content from your curated library to share according to its relevance and virality potential. 

Working with influencers is another content marketing strategy for e-commerce businesses to acquire content from a non-branded source and keep their social media feeds fresh. In addition to trends, Buzzsumo also helps you find the best influencers to work with by identifying the most active and engaging accounts relevant to your brand.  

6. Quuu

• Specialty: Personalized content suggestions
• Top features: Curated content library of personalized suggestions and seamless integration with social media platforms
• Pricing: Pro plan: $5/month and Business plan: $15.83/month. Agency plans are available upon request

Quuu’s shining star is its AI assistant, Robin. Trained by the human team that once hand-curated content for Quuu’s users, Robin searches the web every day to send you relevant news articles, podcast episodes, blog posts, and more. 

It seamlessly integrates with popular social media marketing platforms like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Hubspot, and you can choose what to share to your social media accounts manually or allow the auto-pilot to post for you.

7. Curated

• Specialty: Streamlined and user-friendly newsletter creation
• Top features: Quick capture of interesting content to add to your newsletters 
• Pricing: Price varies based on the number of newsletter subscribers — consult the pricing page for a complete breakdown of the cost

Running low on ideas to spice up your email newsletters? Curated’s got you covered. This curation platform was built specifically to streamline the process of creating, curating, and sending newsletters. 

With the Curated Chrome extension, you can easily collect and organize articles from various sources that you think your audience will find valuable. When it’s time to assemble your newsletter (using Curated’s library of templates), you can choose the best links, add them to the newsletter, and include summaries or comments about the content you’re sharing that add your brand’s perspective to the mix. 

8. Huzzaz

• Specialty: Video curation and enhanced video sharing experience
• Top features: Embeddable video collections for websites and customizable video gallery layouts
• Pricing: A free version is available, and the Pro version is $9/month

In the visually-driven world of e-commerce, video is king. Huzzaz is a tool designed for video content curation, allowing you to create video collections that can be shared and embedded on different platforms, including your website and social media channels.

With Huzzaz, you can curate video content from sources like YouTube and Vimeo, and use customizable video galleries to showcase products, tutorials, customer testimonials, and other video content in an organized and visually appealing way.

9. Content Studio

• Specialty: Unified content marketing and social media management
• Top features: Advanced content discovery tools and workflow automation for planning and publishing content
• Pricing: Starter: $25/month, Pro: $49/month, and Agency: $99/month

Content Studio is an all-in-one social media management platform, but one of its standout features is content curation. The tool lets you set up a library of curated content that can be filled out automatically, by following popular topics of interest, or manually, by filtering content based on keywords, domains, and other factors. 

This content curation software shows you how each piece of content is performing, and you can then automatically distribute your favorite and most successful pieces across social media channels, directly from the platform.  

10. Buffer

• Specialty: Streamlined social media posting and analytics
• Top features: Ability to schedule and share content across multiple platforms and detailed analytics for tracking content performance
• Pricing: A free version is available. Other plans include Essentials: $6/month for one channel, Team: $12/month for one channel, and Agency: $120/month for 10 channels

Successful content curation isn’t just about finding and sharing the right content. It also involves efficiently managing it across platforms. Buffer is an excellent answer to this need, as it offers an all-in-one solution for scheduling, publishing, and analyzing social media content.

Keeping track of what to post, when to post, and measuring the impact of both curated and original content can be overwhelming. Buffer streamlines this complexity with a single platform from which you can manage all your social media profiles and activities.

11. Pinterest

• Specialty: Inspirational image discovery and bookmarking
• Top features: Powerful visual search engine and curated boards for key themes
• Pricing: Free

Pinterest is a one-stop shop for users everywhere to find and curate inspirational visual content. It’s a user-friendly way to create and share collections of images, videos, and GIFs, known as pins, that can be organized into thematic boards.

Pinterest’s guided search feature makes it a breeze for you to find content that is aligned with your brand themes, guidelines, and aesthetics. And since pins usually link to the original website, the platform also functions as a gateway to find other fresh content sources that are relevant to your brand and target audience. 

12. Bazaarvoice

• Specialty: Collecting and amplifying user-generated content (UGC) to build brand trust and authenticity
• Top features: Creator Partnerships, ReviewSource, Sampling, Retail Syndication
• Pricing: See pricing page 

User-generated content (reviews, photos, videos, or any content created by your audience) isn’t just a fantastic source of engaging content for your marketing channels — it’s the backbone of consumer trust. The Bazaarvoice platform offers a multitude of solutions, but collecting and amplifying UGC is at the core of what we do — you can watch a demo here.

Bazaarvoice specializes in collecting the most engaging and brand-safe UGC on your behalf, and then distributing it across your marketing channels to boost visibility and make the content work harder. 

Through our Influenster community, and partnerships with nano, micro, and mid-tier content creators, Bazaarvoice also helps you generate fresh and relevant UGC, so you have a steady stream of authentic content to populate your social media channels and website.

Your customers are the most valuable content curation tools

Out of all the engaging and brand-relevant content swimming around the internet, none is as powerful as the voice of the customer. If you want to keep your marketing channels fed through a constant source of authentic content that also impacts your bottom line, authentic UGC is the way forward.

Tap into the power of UGC and put your customers to work. To get started, read our e-bookDownload our e-book and learn how to build a digital content supply chain with user-generated content at its core. 

Every day, hundreds of millions of posts appear on social media. Consumers are often inundated with content from brands, while retailers and brands find themselves shouting into the void. 

To stand out among the marketers jostling to be heard on social media, you must be smart, not loud. The best strategy is leveraging user-generated content (UGC) creators from your ideal customers. This approach will help you go beyond the once-and-done buyers and reach consumers who shop again and again. Let these loyalists become your brand advocates. 

Consumers want to build relationships, connect emotionally, and support the brands they cherish, especially during a tough economy. You just have to guide them. Here are some strategies for targeting and nurturing loyal customers to become your brand advocates. 

What is a brand advocate?

A brand advocate is an individual who shares their positive sentiment and experiences about your brand with their followers and friends.

Brand advocates are true loyalists. They enjoy your products, interact with you on social media, and appreciate opportunities to share feedback with you. It’s more than just whether people are spending money with you — it’s about emotion and identity.

According to Leonie Brown, Qualtrics XM Scientist, “True loyalists understand your product and brand, believe your offering to be good value, and identify with your product on a personal level.” 

Why you need brand advocates

Brand-generated marketing is important in a healthy marketing mix, but it’s impossible to meet consumers’ demands for content with traditional marketing messages alone, especially when your marketing team has a lean budget. Consumers also actually prefer UGC created by their peers. 

Brand advocates, who are real customers and love your brand, are the mouthpiece you didn’t know you needed. Because brand advocates are just regular people and not affiliated with your company, they’re highly influential. 

Consumers trust other consumers more than anyone else. 100% of shoppers say they’ve purchased a product based on a recommendation from another shopper that they saw online, and 78% trust everyday social media users just as much or more than they did a few years ago. 

Most shoppers say they won’t buy anything without consulting UGC first. They especially seek out customer reviews and photos or videos from other shoppers. 

Encourage a peer-to-peer recommendation environment by tapping into your brand advocates. 69% of marketers today are working with smaller creators, like everyday consumers and social media users. Partnering with these creators brings higher engagement, trust, and authenticity than traditional marketing — and, it’s cost-effective, scalable content. 

The creator economy is booming and is currently valued at $16.4 billion. Over half (53%) of shoppers consider themselves to be UGC creators, according to the Bazaarvoice Shopper Experience Index. 17% of these creators actively create UGC, and 36% will do so when asked. 

5 ways to find brand advocates

Both shoppers and marketers are tightening their budgets these days. Activating brand advocates makes other consumers feel more confident shopping with you, and this strategy offers a high return on investment when marketing teams need to do more with less. 

Consumers are leaning more into the expertise of everyday social media users and subject matter experts to discover new products, learn about how something can meet their needs, and purchase with confidence. 

We’ve found that about 1% of your community — your loyalists — can produce about 90% of your content. You just need to target your brand advocates and harness their power. Here’s how to find them. 

1. In-person events

Events like in-store holiday activations, sports-themed contests, or awareness month campaigns are a fun way to engage shoppers in real life. In-person events can help you stand out by offering something unique and memorable. 

In-person events also help you get to know your most loyal shoppers. Pay close attention to those who show up, as well as consumers who make an effort to speak to you, ask questions about your brand or products, and purchase from you. 

Loyalists tend to show up organically to an in-person event. But, you can reward them and make them feel extra special by peeking into your shopper data and personally inviting them to attend. This approach will build and nurture relationships with brand advocates. 

Another way to leverage in-person events is to see who usually attends similar activations. For instance, we spoke to digital creator Marina Mitrakos, whose passion for fashion and beauty led her to create content for brands. One way she’s developed her business is by attending fashion and beauty events and posting about them on social media. 

2. Email list/newsletter

While people enjoy receiving messages from brands in their inboxes, sending a mass blanket email to everyone on your list isn’t the best way to find brand advocates. People stay on email lists for years and never actually interact with brands. 

So, go beyond the people that are simply on your email list. Instead, track engagement on email content, like clicks on coupons, responses to polls and surveys, or email replies. These interactions showcase the consumers who are genuinely interested and invested in your brand. 

Emails are also a great way to ask customers for feedback and collect UGC, ultimately turning them into brand advocates. Our Shopper Experience Index revealed that 43% of consumers prefer brands and retailers to use emails to ask them for their opinions on products they’ve purchased. 

Sending an email after someone purchases from you to say thanks and ask for reviews and other UGC yields big results. We’ve found that review request emails increase review content by 4x to 9x, and sending a follow-up may lead to a 50% increase in review volume — or much more. Clothing brand MeUndies, for example, has seen a 218% increase in review collection since optimizing review request emails.

When requesting UGC, consumers like it when you tell them exactly what kind of content you want. For example, 60% will take a photo if you ask them to. 

Shoppers appreciate it when they feel like brands care about what they have to say and are listening and responding to their needs. They’ll be more than willing to respond to your request, create UGC, and become a brand advocate. 

3. Cause-related marketing campaigns

Cause marketing refers to marketing strategies that strive to increase revenue, while also taking action to improve society in some way. This might involve raising money or awareness for an issue or charitable organization or highlighting your sustainability or corporate responsibility initiatives. 

If your brand values a specific social, environmental, or humanitarian cause, be vocal about it — and take note of who’s interacting with content related to your cause. Consumers want to support and advocate for brands and retailers that also support the issues they care most about. 

For instance, if being eco-friendly matters to your brand, share your sustainability efforts and regularly promote that you’re cutting down on boxes and shipping to target customers who prefer to shop with sustainable brands. These efforts pay off. 

According to a Bazaarvoice survey of the Influenster community, 78% of shoppers said they prioritize using sustainable products across categories, and 77% will pay more for products promoted as “sustainable” or “clean.” 88% will purchase from new brands if they claim to be more sustainable. 

4. Pay attention to your social channels

Who are your most engaged followers? Most shoppers do follow their favorite brands on social media, but you should hone in on the followers who interact with you most. 

Knowing who frequently comments on your social posts, shares your content, enters giveaways, tags other users, and talks about your brand on social is crucial. These social media users make compelling brand advocates!

Social media is an amazing platform for starting conversations and getting noticed. Nearly 60% of shoppers discover new products and services on social media, where they research items and make purchasing decisions. Most shoppers also buy things directly from social media. 

Keeping tabs on who’s talking about you on social media is important, but don’t neglect people who are sliding into your DMs. Direct messages are an excellent place for one-on-one conversations and connections. 

Responding to any DMs, posts, or other customer feedback is crucial for relationship-building. Consumers expect a response from brands when they offer feedback, and responding heightens trust and showcases your authenticity. 

5. Targeted shopper communities

Using a product discovery and reviews platform like the Influenster App, gives you the opportunity to target the largest community of everyday consumers and skilled creators to generate the highest-quality UGC — including reviews, photos, videos, and social content. This, in turn, increases brand awareness, lets you reach new audiences, and helps you convert more customers across brand and retail. 

Influenster matches your product to your ideal audiences based on over 1,000 data points for each of the community’s 8 million global members. You can activate unique segments, such as loyalists and competitive users, members who shop at key retailers, and consumers with specific skincare or dietary needs. 

The ability to hyper-target consumers based on behaviors and other characteristics beyond typical demographics was a key benefit in choosing Influenster

Elizabeth Northrup, Associate Brand Manager at Kraft Heinz

Influenster members are also prolific content creators. Based on Bazaarvoice Sampling Community data from June 2023, here’s a look at what these members bring to the table: 

• 500,000+ new pieces of UGC each month
• 73 million total monthly impressions for Influenster social campaigns
• 34,000+ posts for Influenster social campaigns
• $5.5 million total monthly earned media value for Influenster social campaigns

One of the most effective ways to tap into the Influenster community and reap these benefits is through product sampling. This strategy gets your products into the hands of your ideal customers. In turn, they create authentic content about your brand in the form of social posts, reviews, photos, or videos. 

Beauty giant Rimmel sent its new Wonder Ombre Holographic Eyeliner out to target consumers through sending custom sampling boxes. This helped the brand collect over 1,200 product reviews, which are displayed on Influenster, the brand’s website, and syndicated across its retail partner websites. 

Rimmel’s sampling campaign generated real impact for the brand, including: 

• 44% higher sales lift versus benchmarks for average digital campaigns in the beauty category
• 69% higher sales life versus benchmarks in the product categories of the sampled products
• 73% of samplers said they would likely purchase something from Rimmel in the next 6 months 

Targeting your ideal customers to be brand advocates

One-time or some-time customers are great. But, marketing to all-the-time customers is a winning strategy. These shoppers are your ideal customers, who love your products, your mission, and the experiences you provide, both online and in-person. 

Finding and building relationships with your brand advocates builds trust with other consumers — helping you stand out and helping them feel confident and appreciated.

If you’re struggling to find advocates for your brand or you don’t know where to look, Bazaarvoice affable.ai is an AI-driven influencer marketing platform that lets you easily find your creators, manage collaborations, track your campaigns, and measure your performance.

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Masterclass: How to find and activate brand-safe creators

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Think about it, if you pay for a front-row seat at the ballet, you expect to see a spectacle of coordination and grace. After all, you didn’t spend good money to witness one dancer headbanging to Tchaikovsky while another is pirouetting across the stage. That would be a disappointment (and probably, a little weird).

Audiences have similar expectations for your brand. They want a synchronized visual identity, precise messaging, and a steady experience across every touchpoint. In short, they want consistency.

With so many channels to manage, each demanding more and fresher content than the last, how can brands keep consistency at the forefront?

Chapters:

1. What is brand consistency and why is it important?
2. 8 strategies to keep your branding consistent
3. Examples of brand consistency
4. From consistency to authenticity: the next step for your brand

What is brand consistency and why is it important?

Brand consistency means delivering content and experiences in line with your brand’s identity, values, and strategy across all channels. It’s about creating a cohesive narrative that threads through every Instagram story, every Google ad, and every PR package. 

This unified approach makes your brand instantly recognizable, whether through the color palette of your ads, the tone of your content, or the personality of your social media posts.

With consistent branding, your audience is enveloped in the essence of your brand with every interaction, slowly building trust and familiarity. 

Enhance brand recognition

Think of how a green mermaid signals a Starbucks, or how a checkmark instantly brings Nike to mind. These symbols are the shorthand for the brands they represent — not by chance, but by careful consistency, respected and maintained over the years and across channels.

You want your brand to become a friendly face in the crowd, a welcoming sight to customers. Repeated exposure to the same visuals, slogans, and brand ethos helps you accomplish that. When your brand is consistently represented, it doesn’t just stand out. It stands for something in the minds of consumers. It becomes a story they remember and trust, one that feels comforting in its familiarity. 

And trust is the foundation of successful customer relationships: if people trust you, they will reward you with purchases, recommendations, and long-lasting loyalty.

Foster brand advocacy

Consistent branding transcends visual elements. Uniformity in logos, colors, and typography matters, but it’s just as essential to deliver on your brand’s promises and provide reliable experiences. 

When customers encounter consistent messaging, the same level of service, and the same commitment to quality in every interaction, they turn into vocal advocates for your brand.

Advocates aren’t just sharing a logo. They’re sharing powerful stories that can make other people excited about your company. They’re the ones who celebrate your brand and carry it forward, all because they have come to trust in its unwavering presence in their lives.

8 strategies to keep your branding consistent

Let’s dissect eight actionable steps you can take to lay the groundwork for a strong brand identity and maintain its integrity across all platforms and initiatives. 

1. Establish and enforce brand guidelines

Let’s go back to our headbanging and pirouetting dancers. In this scenario, there’s an obvious disconnect. Everyone is doing something different because there isn’t a clear set of steps to follow. The same level of chaos ensues when a brand operates without guidelines.

Guidelines are a blueprint for how your brand shows itself to the world. They ensure that everyone, from the marketing team to external partners, understands how to represent the brand correctly. 

Here’s the key elements that should be included in your guidelines:

• Logo usage: Instructions on how to use the logo (and its variants), including sizing, spacing, what to avoid, and variations for different contexts
• Color palette: An explanation of primary and secondary brand colors, including exact color codes for print, web, and digital
• Typography: Detailing the typefaces and fonts your brand uses, including hierarchies and how they should be used in various formats
• Imagery and iconography: Guidance on the style and types of images, illustrations, and icons that fit with the brand’s aesthetic
• Voice and tone: Outline of the brand’s personality in writing, including how it should sound in different types of communication
• Editorial style: The particular style choices your brand makes in writing, which can include grammar, punctuation, and preferred spelling
• Brand story: A narrative that communicates the brand’s history, mission, vision, and core values
• Applications: Examples of how to apply these elements in different contexts, such as social media, advertising, website design, packaging, and more

Once the guidelines are in place, store them in a central location, like a shared drive or an intranet, where they can be easily accessed by anyone who needs them. 

The enforcing part is just as relevant as the establishing portion. Guidelines won’t do any good if no one uses them, so conduct regular training sessions for all employees, especially team members directly working with your brand’s identity. These sessions should walk through the guidelines in detail, explaining the rationale behind each element and showcasing examples of correct and incorrect usage. 

2. Regularly audit your brand across channels

Maintaining brand consistency is an active process. While creating guidelines lays the foundation, audits keep the performance in line and synchronized across channels. 

Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow for your brand consistency audits:

1. Do thorough channel reviews. Review every channel where your brand is present, from social media platforms to your website and ads. Look for discrepancies in brand elements like logo placement, color schemes, and font usage. Check that your brand’s core messages are clear and that all content supports your overall brand story, and evaluate whether the tone and voice are uniform
2. Monitor brand touchpoints. Consider the customer journey from start to finish. Is there a consistent level of service and brand presence at every touchpoint, from initial discovery through post-purchase support?
3. Evaluate partnership and affiliate representation. Make sure partners, influencers, and affiliates are adhering to your guidelines. Their representation of your brand should be as accurate and consistent as your own channels
4. Conduct a competitive benchmarking. Regularly compare your branding efforts with your competitors to evaluate whether your brand stands out while adhering to industry standards

The frequency of these audits will depend on the size of your company and the scope of your branding efforts, but they should be regular enough to catch issues before they become ingrained in your brand’s presentation. Quarterly or bi-annual audits strike a balance between being thorough and adaptable. 

3. Create and maintain a social media posting schedule

Social media channels are often the most dynamic touchpoints of a brand, buzzing with updates and conversations. So much activity means they’re particularly vulnerable to inconsistencies, but creating a social media content calendar curbs potential issues on this front.

A disciplined posting schedule helps you evenly distribute content across important dates and events, so that your message is timely and relevant. It also allows you to cater to the nuances of each platform while maintaining the thread of your brand’s voice and visual style. For instance, the fast pace of X (formerly known as Twitter) might require multiple updates a day, while Instagram may benefit from a well-crafted post every other day. 

Keeping a consistent schedule also means you can plan better for active engagement — answering comments, joining conversations, and updating followers with fresh and relevant content that reinforces your brand promise.

4. Monitor and respond to feedback

Customer feedback, whether it’s in the form of online reviews, social media comments, or customer surveys, provides precious insights into how your brand is perceived across different channels. 

Regularly monitoring this feedback helps you understand the customer experience and identify any inconsistencies in brand communication. If customers frequently mention a disconnect between your brand on social media and your website (very friendly and humorous vs extremely serious, for example), that’s a clear sign that your brand consistency needs attention.

Actively responding to feedback also shows that your brand values its customers and is committed to maintaining a dialogue with them. This doesn’t just apply to positive feedback, either! How your brand addresses criticism or negative comments can significantly impact customer perceptions. A consistent, respectful, and solution-oriented response strategy helps reinforce your brand’s ethos, even in the face of challenges.

5. Practice what you preach

As we already touched on, consistent branding is also about living up to the expectations set by your brand’s promises. When your company’s actions align with its stated values and mission, customers take notice. And the opposite is also true.

Say your brand positions itself as an environmentally friendly and sustainable company, but then customers discover your products are packaged with non-recyclable materials. This discrepancy will lead to a loss of trust in your commitment to sustainability. Customers expect the brands they support to be transparent and genuine in their practices, not just in their messaging. 

Part of practicing what you preach involves regularly reviewing and reassessing your business practices and products to ensure they stay in sync with your branding. It’s okay to stumble, as long as you own up to it — according to Sprout Social, 89% of people say a business can regain their trust if it admits to a mistake and is transparent about the steps it will take to resolve the issue.

6. Don’t sleep on customer service

Customer service is a public performance of your brand’s commitment to its values, and consistency on this front is just as crucial as in any other aspect of your branding. 

If your brand is known for being cheerful and friendly, each service interaction should reflect that. Every email, phone call, and live chat should display the same level of enthusiasm and warmth that customers have come to expect based on your brand’s messaging and personality. It’s not just about resolving customer issues — it’s about doing it in a way that reinforces your identity.

This is another area where your promises are put to the test. If your brand touts its commitment to swift customer service, every aspect of customer interaction should be optimized for speed, from the first response to the resolution. 

Train your customer service team to understand and embody your brand’s identity and values. Arm them with the knowledge and tools to provide a consistent level of service that matches your standards and voice across all channels.

And, of course, collect feedback from your customers and use it to refine your service approach and align it more closely with their expectations.

7. Work with partners that source the right content for your brand

Producing enough content to keep up with the fast-paced nature of social media is a common challenge for brands. One of the best solutions to this conundrum is sourcing and sharing UGC (user-generated content), which is any piece of content produced by customers and not brands. 

While this takes the weight of creating content off brands’ shoulders, there’s the issue of curating it. UGC brings the voice of the customer into your brand narrative, but not every piece of content is guaranteed to resonate with your brand’s voice or adhere to your guidelines. And sifting through all the UGC to ensure it does is time-consuming and out of reach for teams short on time.

Solutions like Creator Partnerships take on the heavy lifting of content sourcing and curation, allowing you to tap into the power of UGC without risking brand consistency. Connect brands with a network of content creators to produce high-quality, on-brand social content that amplifies your brand story through their engaged followings. 

The process is simple — you provide your content goals, ideal audience, and core messaging, and Bazaarvoice handles the rest. We make sure that the content not only resonates with your audience but also follows the guidelines, feeling like a natural extension of your brand.

8. Don’t follow trends blindly

The pressure to jump on the next TikTok trend or Instagram fad is hard to ignore. And trends can be a powerful way to put your brand in front of new audiences, show off your personality, and humanize the company. But doing so without strategic thinking can muddle your brand and dilute its consistency.

Before adopting or adding your own spin to a social media trend, ask yourself whether it aligns with your values and messaging. Not every viral hashtag challenge or meme format fits the narrative your brand is building, and that’s okay. The key is to be selective and integrate trends that complement your brand identity rather than overshadow it.

If your brand is on the more sober and professional side, suddenly participating in a quirky dance will disorient your audience (yes, the headbanging dancer metaphor is still relevant here.) 

On the flip side, if a trend naturally aligns with your brand’s persona, it can be woven into your marketing strategy to feel organic and enhance engagement without sacrificing brand consistency.

3 examples of brand consistency 

What does brand consistency look like in action? Here’s what three successful brands can teach us about maintaining a cohesive narrative across channels, products, and marketing campaigns.

1. Duolingo

You know the bird, we know the bird, your grandma probably knows the bird. Duolingo’s green owl has become an emblematic figure for language learning worldwide. And it’s not just about the bird, but rather the personality that Duolingo consistently manifests in every platform. 

From its friendly push notifications to its playful social media presence, Duolingo maintains a cohesive narrative that’s equal parts instructive and entertaining. The brand leverages its quirky tone of voice and approachable visual style to create a learning experience that feels less like a chore and more like a conversation with a witty friend (who is sometimes a tad menacing).

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Whether it’s through their app or social media posts, Duolingo stays true to its core message: learning can be fun. It has turned language education on its head by keeping a consistent theme of gamification and light-heartedness that resonates with a broad audience. The signature green color palette and the playful illustrations are instantly recognizable, and also present across the website, app, emails, and social media.

Plus, even when the brand innovates, it’s imbued with the same personality that audiences have come to love. The Duolingo ABC app for kid literacy, for example, carries over the same brand aesthetics and ethos, providing familiarity and reliability to users.

2. Amazon

Amazon set the bar high for brand consistency across every single customer touchpoint. The iconic smile etched onto its logo represents what Amazon promises to deliver with every package, service, and interaction — customer joy and satisfaction.

This pledge to put customer happiness above all else is consistently present in all aspects of Amazon’s branding. Its website is intuitive and takes a no-frills approach to design and navigation, its voice maintains a professional and informative tone across channels, and every new business venture, from cloud computing to entertainment, remains unmistakably Amazon. 

The e-commerce giant only got this far because it walks the walk. Amazon doesn’t just say it’s customer obsessed, but proves it with fast and hassle-free deliveries, personalized recommendations, swift resolutions to customer issues, and generous return policies.

3. Glossier

We live in an aesthetics-obsessed world, particularly where social media is concerned. When cosmetics brand Glossier arrived on the scene, it quickly captured the hearts and wallets of its target audience — millennial and Gen Z women. And a lot of its success can be attributed to the aesthetically pleasing, pastel-glazed branding that spoke directly to what consumers craved.

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From the simple, functional, and feminine packaging to the minimalistic yet ethereal store decor, every aspect of Glossier’s branding reflects that it “was built to make beauty accessible and uncomplicated.” It hit the sweet spot in projecting an aspirational but very approachable persona, a “big sister” the audience looks up to and is more than happy to engage with.

The brand’s social media presence, particularly on Instagram and TikTok, was vital in establishing Glossier’s identity and building a community of mega fans that spread the word about the company. Each product picture aligns with the brand’s visual identity, while each tutorial further emphasizes Glossier’s ethos that beauty doesn’t have to be complicated.

From consistency to authenticity: the next step for your brand

Consistent branding is key to becoming a familiar and steady presence in your audience’s lives, feeds, and inboxes. But in a saturated and highly competitive market, consistency alone isn’t enough to thrive. Brands that truly wish to stand out and build lasting bonds with their customers have to be authentic.

Authenticity is the linchpin of customer trust. Today’s shoppers have more choices and power than ever, so it’s up to brands to be transparent, human, and reliable. For a complete set of strategies for building consumer trust with authenticity, try our e-book: The authenticity movement: building consumer trust.

What is brand trust?

Brand trust is the amount of loyalty and support customers have for your brand and how strongly they believe you can fulfil your brand promises. It’s based on customer experiences with your brand as well as company messaging and reputation.

Brands and retailers who can’t establish trust with consumers, or even worse, who lose established trust, will struggle to win business. We’re in an age when consumer opinions are shared on a massive scale and directly influence brand perception. 

In a Bazaarvoice study, 54% of consumers said that if a brand hasn’t broken trust, they’d still buy from them again — even after a negative experience. 

5 ways to build brand trust

It’s simple. When your customers trust you, they’ll be loyal to you almost no matter what. Here’s how to build consumer trust in your brand. 

1. Work with a trustworthy UGC provider 

One way to increase brand trust in e-commerce is by getting your consumers to advocate for your brand for you. Shoppers trust user-generated content (UGC) in the form of reviews more than they trust family and friend recommendations. Instead of trying to control what people are saying, brands and retailers should embrace this conversation and amplify it.

However, to maintain brand trust, reviews must be authentic. According to our survey of 10,000 global shoppers, if shoppers suspect a product has fake reviews:

• 81% will avoid using that brand again
• 48% leave a negative review
• 25% wouldn’t purchase from the website
• 16% will post negatively about the brand on social media

That’s why a good UGC program requires strong content moderation. A trustworthy UGC provider that values authenticity can help your brand sort through reviews and eliminate fake ones that hurt your credibility and destroy consumer trust.

For example, Bazaarvoice evaluates UGC through a process of machine learning and human moderation to ensure it isn’t fraudulent and that it represents a customer’s genuine opinion about their experience with the product(s).

27% of consumers think brands with fake content should be fined up to 30% of their revenue — and governments are taking note. The FTC recently fined one company over $4 million for suppressing authentic content, so not only will fake content harm your reputation but it will harm your wallet too.

2. Publicize company values

According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, consumers today grant brand trust based on two attributes: competence and ethical behavior. Like doing the right thing and working to improve society.

Consumers want to see what your brand believes in and how you follow through on those beliefs. And with the various significant events taking place across the globe, they especially want to know how your brand responds to your community in times of crisis. This is particularly true when it comes to Gen Z, who value brand trust, transparency, and authenticity above all else.

Creating content about your values for your website is a good start, but make sure this messaging is also visible on your social channels. About 35% of consumers look to a brand’s social media to seek out content about company response and values. 

You also need to be mindful of who your brand partners with. Any influencers or partners you collaborate with should share your brand values and have a solid reputation. They’ll connect with consumers in ways that are relevant and sensitive to their needs and help authentically communicate your brand’s values. 

3. Focus on great customer service 

90% of consumers say a brand’s level of customer service is an important factor in their choice to become a customer. A proactive customer service strategy should include responding to customer feedback and reviews, both negative and positive.

Around 60% of consumers say that negative reviews are just as important as positive reviews in their decision to purchase. And the way you respond to these negative reviews can speak volumes about your brand’s values and may even convert more browsers into buyers. A consumer’s willingness to purchase a product with a negative review doubles when seeing a brand’s response, as opposed to seeing the negative review by itself. And, up to 70% of dissatisfied customers will do business with a company again if their complaint is resolved.

When you see a negative review, take the time to craft a quick, but personal, response. Consumers want to talk to a real person, not a review response bot. Show them that you sympathize with their issue and that you’re learning from criticism. Mention that their feedback will be used for future improvements. This will only boost your brand trust.

In your online response, ask the customer to contact you offline. And be clear about why. Are you trying to understand the problem because your team is working on product improvements? Are you looking for details on the issue so you can prevent it from happening again? Was there a defect, and you need their contact information to send the new product?

Don’t forget to give the customer a way to contact your brand, whether that’s via a preferred phone number or email address. 

4. Create high-quality products

Reviews are excellent sources of information to analyze how consumers feel about your products’ quality. When you pay attention to common customer pain points, you have the opportunity to fix issues before your products earn a negative reputation and win back customers before you lose them entirely.

Look for key topics in your negative reviews. Do customers complain about particular product features? Long shipping times or damaged delivery? Is there something missing that they wanted from the product? Was the product description inaccurate?

Share this customer sentiment with your product quality or manufacturing team (or with vendors if you’re a retailer) to make improvements that keep your products competitive and meet consumer expectations. 

5. Price your products fairly 

According to Prisnyc, a competitor price tracking and monitoring company, about 60% of consumers consider pricing as the very first criteria of their buying decision, and 86% say it’s important to compare prices from different sellers when shopping. 

When’s the last time you compared your product price to the competition? If it’s been a while, it’s time to re-evaluate. How do your prices differ from competitors? 

Consumers value transparency. If your product is significantly more expensive than the competition and there’s a reason for it (like you use a higher quality material), don’t be afraid to call that out on your product pages. 

Build brand trust with the voice of the customer

To protect consumer trust, your brand must prioritize honesty and transparency in everything you do, from reviews to customer service to product pricing. One of the best ways to gain insights into how customers feel about your brand and communicate trust is through ratings and reviews. 

Leverage the authentic voice of your customers to build brand trust and sell your products. Taking the time to invest in your ratings and reviews program will help you build the foundation for long-lasting relationships and brand trust with your customers, leading to more sales — after all, customers who interact with UGC are 2x as likely to convert.

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Masterclass: How to grow and protect consumer trust

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This comprehensive guide to thought leadership strategy for brands and retailers will explain the benefits of thought leadership marketing and what quality thought leadership content actually looks like, including examples from consumer brands.

Chapters:

1. Thought leadership marketing benefits and metrics
2. How to get started with thought leadership content strategy
3. Create brand momentum with owned media 
4. Convert momentum into revenue with earned media
5. Fuel brand momentum with shared media
6. Why a thought leadership strategy needs authenticity to work

Tech and finance workers in New York City adopted a new look after 2008’s economic downturn, one that reigns supreme today: a button-down, slacks, and a Patagonia vest. Patagonia, an outdoor brand known for their commitment to sustainability, was an incongruous staple in the “midtown uniform,” but a staple it became. One might see a sweater knit, a Nano Puff, and a fleece on the same Murray Hill city block, but all three vests will be Patagonia. And until recently, the finance worker’s vest might have included a logo of Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, or Goldman Sachs.

In 2019, Patagonia decided to stop selling logo-clad fleece vests to finance firms through their corporate sales program, a move that was lauded by the press and Patagonia’s core audience of outdoor enthusiasts alike. While the decision came with accolades, it also carried risk: in excluding finance companies from corporate sales, Patagonia intentionally walked away from a cash-flush market of consumers who were unexpectedly loyal to their products.

Patagonia initially said they’d continue to work with “mission-driven companies that prioritize the planet” in corporate sales, but in 2021, they doubled down on the strategy, deciding to transition away from corporate logos altogether. The move impacted Silicon Valley tech workers, in particular, who often donned a similar uniform to their East Coast counterparts.

Shutting down their practice of adding other companies’ logos to their clothing was a landmark move in Patagonia’s brand marketing, one that gave credibility to decades of thought leadership strategy.

Patagonia’s brand has its roots in climate impact — before launching Patagonia in 1973, founder Yvon Chouinard was working on a way to reduce rock damage from steel pitons. Until the early 1990s, they were more product-driven, focusing thought leadership campaigns on textile innovation in the 1970s and 1980s. Patagonia returned to their sustainable roots in the early ’90s, pivoting their brand and marketing strategy toward sustainability without abandoning textile technology completely. 

Patagonia’s pivot paid off. But it took time, consistency, focus, and action to succeed. Patagonia’s decades of commitment to sustainable practices — using cause marketing to evangelize their message — earned the brand a meaningful reputation as a commercial thought leader in sustainability in the modern era. Today, Patagonia is considered one of the world’s most powerful brands.

Thought leadership marketing benefits and metrics

At its core, thought leadership is about building credibility as a brand. By showcasing unique strengths and passions that exist at the heart of a brand through content, consumer marketers build trust, foster loyalty, and stand out from competitors.

Why focus resources on building brand strength when about three-quarters of brands say that economic pressures will impact media budgets and performance marketing is easier to prove? Ignoring brand strength isn’t about vanity metrics — it’s about revenue and resilience. 

Brand strength makes everything else in marketing — including direct response — easier and cheaper. A strong brand is the basis of a resilient consumer business, one with a large base of loyal customers who repurchase, engage, and evangelize. 

Revenue-resilient thought leadership takes alignment between a brand, its consumers, and industry experts. If a brand is beloved by experts but not by consumers, it can’t grow. If it’s beloved by consumers but side-eyed by scientists, it can’t sustain its market share indefinitely.

How to get started with thought leadership content strategy

No brand is equipped to become a thought leader about everything. If your brand doesn’t know itself well enough to focus on one core message, you’ll have a harder time building enough traction with consumers or media to develop a reputation as a thought leader. A thought leadership strategy takes depth, experience, commitment, and focus over a long period of time, and successful thought leaders pick one topic and stick with it. 

Brands that have developed momentum in thought leadership marketing tend to focus on either values or products but rarely both in the same measure at the same time. 

It’s possible to be value-driven and product-driven as a brand. However, successful thought leaders put one or the other at the center of their thought leadership marketing strategy to fuel momentum in a single direction over time.

Value-driven thought leadership uses emotion to examine why a company exists and showcases their positive impact on the world. Product-driven thought leadership uses logic to showcase proprietary technology, unique product expertise, or original opinions about a product category. 

Compare Dyson, another one of the world’s most powerful brands, to Patagonia. While both have used a thought leadership marketing strategy to build and retain brand strength over decades, Patagonia now focuses on values, while Dyson continues to showcase their engineering expertise. Dyson’s relentless commitment to invention and innovation gives them a competitive edge over alternatives in multiple verticals — something they reinforce with content marketing.

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A post shared by Dyson (@dyson)

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Product-driven thought leaders like Dyson build trust through expertise and logic. On Dyson’s blog, the brand showcases the curiosity and brilliance of their engineering team to humanize and clarify product features. This interview with Dyson engineer Tim Jukes takes customers behind the scenes of a proprietary technology. Jukes details a summer-long meteorological study he conducted to recreate the feeling of a natural breeze, which was eventually incorporated into Dyson’s air purifiers.

Value-driven thought leaders rally their existing audiences around a cause. Patagonia’s video about plastic called The Monster in Our Closet, featured prominently on their website, is an anxiety-inducing manifesto about the problems of plastic in apparel, including Patagonia’s own products. 13 seconds into the video, climate advocate Maxine Bédat says, “The planet freaking needs this, and we don’t have time to be d****** around. Excuse me.”

There’s emotion in Bédat’s voice, a call to action for Patagonia’s audience to create change in collaboration with the brand.

1. Create brand momentum with owned media 

Owned media, like email, is the ideal place to create momentum toward a brand goal by seeding advocacy with happy customers.

Patagonia collaborated with Bédat, an existing thought leader in textile sustainability, to strengthen their own brand. In a case where a company’s founder or executive is value-driven and vocal themselves, brands often leverage the founder’s own voice in thought leadership content.

Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of values-driven spice company Diaspora, uses owned media to showcase her brand’s commitment to ethical sourcing. When Diaspora launched Surya Salt in 2023, Javeri Kadri focused the brand’s email announcement on ethics, not product, and signed the email herself. By detailing the mistreatment of Indian salt farmers during British imperial rule and explaining the “awful labor practices” that still exist in the salt industry, Javeri Kadri issued a rallying cry to Diaspora’s customers to help the brand solve an important societal problem through a commercial product.

On product pages, Diaspora reinforces their commitment to ethical sourcing by surfacing regularly updated wage statistics for each product. As of August 2023, Diaspora’s living wage for Surya Salt was more than 14x higher than the Fair Trade International price.

Diaspora is vocal about one thing — ethical sourcing — on every channel. Diaspora’s focus, consistency, and commitment to a specific brand value is why the brand has a reputation as a thought leader in spices, a notoriously competitive space, in a relatively short time.

All of that brand advocacy turns into revenue. When Diaspora launched a $145 salt cellar in the shape of a tiger to complement Surya Salt, the first production run sold out in 41 minutes.

Thought leadership tactics to try on owned media:

• Conduct an in-house research project and publish the results to build credibility, like Dieux’s clinical study on cannabinoids in Deliverance Serum
• Promote a value-based blog post on a store page to deepen brand affinity, like apparel brand Eileen Fisher’s feature on their Regenerative Cotton, which they featured on their cotton collection page
• Surface user-generated content (UGC) that promotes key differentiators or resonant brand values on your product page to improve conversion rates, the same way Iconic London did with their liquid highlighter 
• Humanize a brand value with personal narratives to resonate on an intimate level, like perfume brand Scent Trunk’s Q&As with their perfumers

Leverage owned media to clarify brand positioning and deepen affinity with a core audience before growing traffic and purchase intent on other channels.

2. Convert momentum into revenue with earned media

Earned media, or content that others create to celebrate your brand and your messaging, is great for converting an audience of non-purchasers to loyal customers. UGC, press, and PR are all earned media and can all be used to convert awareness into revenue. 

A product-driven thought leadership marketing strategy tends to produce UGC about products but not values, while value-driven thought leadership campaigns result in a mix. Diaspora’s audience posts UGC about the brand’s values and their products, while Dyson’s customers overwhelmingly create content about Dyson’s products. A search for “dyson” on TikTok is full of demo videos from real customers using their hair styling tools and stick vacuums. One demo of the Dyson Airstrait has 15.9 million views. 

East Fork, a pottery brand, has earned glowing features in media publications that celebrate their thought leadership in both ceramics and equitable business practices. The New York Times celebrated chief executive Connie Matisse’s candor and commitment to issues like wage equity. Architectural Digest focused on founder Alex Matisse’s artistic distinction in ceramics, highlighting his family connection to both Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp. 

Together with their co-founder John Vigeland, Connie Matisse and Alex Matisse have leveraged traditional media to turn East Fork into a thought leader and resilient business by each focusing on their areas of passion and expertise. As East Fork grows, their thought leadership messaging leans more and more in the direction of Connie Matisse’s focus. Their owned media platforms now feature values front and center, a cue to earned media that East Fork is about equity. 

Traditional media and industry outlets can be powerful advocates in building thought leadership, or they can negate a brand’s claims and disrupt momentum toward thought leadership objectives. In 2023, NPR and The Washington Post both published skeptical, even critical, articles about the prebiotic soda industry, questioning the validity of health claims from brands like Poppi.

Harper’s Bazaar was more forgiving of the industry but still refused to validate prebiotic soda brands as thought leaders. Writer Katie Intner concluded, “The wellness benefits of these tonics might be hard to quantify, but the experience of sipping one — and Instagramming it — makes me happy, and isn’t that a benefit in and of itself?”

Poppi has since removed thought leadership content from their website, including a consumer study about gut health and blog posts detailing prebiotic benefits. Instead, Poppi is doubling down on UGC, sending free products to popular influencers like Miriam Ezagui to generate buzz and featuring UGC from creators like Cassie Yeung on their homepage. 

Poppi competitor OLIPOP is testing the opposite approach to combat skepticism with thought leadership — their gut health study is still available on their website alongside resources on probiotics and the microbiome. 

Surfacing UGC in a prominent place builds trust, improves conversion, and reinforces a thought leadership campaign’s core message. In a regulated space like consumer packaged goods, UGC is helpful but not enough to build credibility as a thought leader. Pair UGC with PR campaigns to generate industry press on thought leadership campaigns and foster more trust in the market.

Thought leadership tactics to try with earned media include:

• Quantify the revenue impact using earned media value (EMV) to identify valuable placements and influencers to extend your best experiments
• Leverage UGC as a source of inspiration for thought leadership campaigns to resonate with consumers using their own words

Brands have limited control over earned media. Promote and surface the placements and UGC that reinforce core messaging to build momentum for thought leadership objectives.

3. Fuel brand momentum with shared media

Shared media refers to a channel where you have access to an audience through a third party but cannot access that audience through another tool — like social media. Leverage channels like TikTok and Instagram to reach new audiences and build awareness of thought leadership marketing campaigns. 

Established brands like Everlane pair conversational videos on shared media with long-form content on owned media. Everlane uses long-form thought leadership content to clarify their brand position and connect values to corporate action, while short-form content on shared media distills thought leadership into bite-sized messages for the everyday consumer.

Everlane focused their lens of transparency on recycling, taking customers behind the scenes of their partner recycling facilities on TikTok and publishing personal narratives of recycling professionals on their blog. 

Intimates brand Cherri, founded in 2019, uses grassroots techniques and a shared-media-first approach to build thought leadership in their marketing strategy. In a 2023 interview, founder Gabriella Scaringe said, “It wasn’t until 2021 when I discovered TikTok that Cherri was really born.”

That year, Scaringe went viral on the platform with a video talking about insecurities and underwear. It received supportive comments from other consumers who shared her frustrations, which inspired Scarine to focus on gusset sizing in her thought leadership content. 

Scaringe built on her overnight popularity with a research campaign to study whether gussets on the market actually fit the modern consumer. According to her study of over 5,000 people, the average vulva is 2.5 inches wide, while intimate brands’ average gusset is 1.8 inches wide. Scaringe’s videos generated millions of views, inspiring a new area of brand focus and catalyzing a groundswell of brand advocacy for Cherri. Scaringe continues to build on the success of her thought leadership campaign, criticizing other industry studies for only focusing on Caucasian women and inviting her audience to participate in Cherri’s ongoing research.

Dieux, a skincare brand founded in 2020, uses opinionated thought leadership content on social media to stand out in a crowded space. Dieux’s approach is still about product but with progressive values woven through to build advocacy with their target audience. In CEO Charlotte Palermino’s popular Sunscreen Diaries series, Palermino frequently criticizes U.S. sunscreen legislation. 

Palermino explains the challenges of formulating a sunscreen that doesn’t leave a white cast through videos of herself and Dieux’s team trying lab samples with mixed results. In August 2023, Palermino even collaborated with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to spark conversations on sunscreen filters, claiming that the U.S. is lagging behind countries like South Korea due to regulation practices.

Thought leadership tactics to try on shared media:

• Share key insights from a research project similar to Diaspora’s recent Instagram update on their Farm Worker Fund
• Build in the open, like Dieux’s TikTok series about the obstacles they face in trying to formulate a sunscreen that doesn’t leave a white cast
• Experiment with UGC on paid social campaigns to improve click-through rate, like Parachute, which improved click-through rate by 35% using UGC in paid social ads

Shared media is powerful but volatile. Balance shared media with more predictable channels, like email, to avoid disruptive peaks and valleys in engagement metrics.

Why a thought leadership strategy needs authenticity to work

Brands fall short of becoming thought leaders when they aren’t committed to backing their marketing messages with meaningful — even risky — actions. Yes, even the ones that spend a lot of money on their thought leadership marketing strategy.

Thought leadership takes more than high-quality content and high marketing budgets. Publishing a clinical study doesn’t automatically make a brand a thought leader. Writing an opinion piece doesn’t either. Over a long period of time, those pieces of content can fuel the groundswell necessary to strengthen a brand’s reputation — if they’re focused on the same core message and backed by meaningful action.

Otherwise, it’s just fluff. And in an era when consumers are exhausted by marketing, fluff isn’t enough.

In order to generate momentum, not scandal, thought leadership content must be grounded in truth and backed by action. Diaspora doesn’t just talk about ethical sourcing — they’ve structured their entire company to support that goal. Dyson doesn’t just talk about innovation; they hire inventors who routinely invent new technologies.

It’s not enough to pick a buzzy topic and post an opinionated take on the blog. It’s not enough to claim a brand value on a website and run a splashy campaign to improve a brand’s image. Without years of focus, commitment, and systemic action, those tactics aren’t a thought leadership strategy — they’re just PR.

A well-crafted thought leadership marketing campaign can break through the noise and engage rather than exhaust consumer audiences. Thought leadership takes time to pay off, but getting started is easy. Start asking high-value customers for UGC to kickstart inspiration and foster trust almost immediately. Not sure how? Try this on-demand masterclass: How to collect content that engages and converts.

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How UGC strengthens customer relationships to grow your brand

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What is brand reputation management?

Brand reputation management refers to keeping tabs on how consumers perceive your brand and reacting in a strategic way to maintain, improve, and protect that image. Much of your brand reputation hinges on what consumers say about you on social media and in reviews, and how you communicate with these shoppers. 

Focusing on your brand reputation management is crucial for growth. A positive reputation fosters brand loyalty, inspires shopper confidence, boosts sales, and puts you above your competition. Whereas negative sentiments may cause sales to drop and scare off customers. But hey, it’s not all bad. 

Paying close attention to the chatter about your brand — both positive and negative — presents an opportunity to learn about your customers to help you better meet their needs in the future.

Brand reputation management strategies

Brand reputation management isn’t a one-time deal. It’s a continuous process of keeping up with consumer perception and taking time to resolve any issues that arise.

Here’s the 10 most effective brand management reputation strategies to guide your brand.

1. Encourage ratings and reviews

Shoppers love sharing their opinions of brands, and review spaces give them a forum to offer that feedback. Reviews are a valuable part of the shopping experience. According to our research, 88% of consumers always or mostly read reviews before buying anything and 78% say reviews have the biggest influence on their purchases.

Keeping a fresh crop of reviews flowing in is vital. Consumers tend to spend more on products and services when they encounter positive reviews, and 25% of shoppers think reviews remain relevant after 12 months but most prefer reviews written in in the past three months. After turning to ratings and reviews for their site, retail brand Brother, for example, saw customers spend 3x longer on its website, and they were 2x more likely to click a call-to-action when they engaged with reviews.

The tools can help brands collect reviews and other user-generated content (UGC) like photos and videos.  

If you don’t have many reviews for a certain product, first focus your attention on increasing your review volume. Just a handful of reviews can noticeably increase sales and customer sentiment. There’s several methods for getting more reviews, including sending review request emails and product sampling.

2. Respond to all reviews (even the negative ones)

When customers trust a brand, they’ll return time after time, Cydni Lauper style. Engaging directly with shoppers helps build trust, and one of the best ways to do that is to respond to their feedback — both negative and positive. 

Respond to positive reviews with a thank you and comment on a specific element from their review to personalize the response. Or take the opportunity to emphasize your brand pillars, like your brand’s commitment to customer service. Positive reviews are excellent content, too, so promote them on your product pages and social media channels.

Over 60% of shoppers say negative reviews are just as important as positive ones. (Many people get suspicious when there’s too many positive reviews.) So, you need to respond to this negative feedback as well.

Be understanding and authentic in your reply, and offer a solution, such as sending a product replacement or a genuine apology. This signals to customers that you’re listening and care about making them happy. 

Among unhappy shoppers, 70% will do business with a brand again if their complaint is resolved and 34% will delete a negative review if they’re satisfied with a brand’s response.

3. Answer customer questions 

If an in-store shopper asked you a question about a product or your customer service, would you answer them? Of course, you would. So you need to answer online questions, too. Answering customer questions is a critical part of brand reputation management — it builds loyalty and helps shoppers make confident, informed purchasing decisions.

Enabling a questions and answers platform on your product page(s) can also slash your return rates and the number of customer complaints you’ll receive, and boost conversion rate. 

For example, brands that use Bazaarvoice’s Questions & Answers platform to respond to shopper queries can see a 98% jump in conversions. You can also garner valuable insights from the customer questions to help improve your products or business.

Nestlé Canada enabled Bazaarvoice Q&A on its site and within three months had already responded to 700 questions. Noting consistent negative questions and comments about a particular product, the brand reacted by changing the recipe and the product’s average star rating jumped from 1.7 to 4 stars.

4. Share your mission 

Consumers increasingly want to shop with ethical brands that have a mission that aligns with their own values. Especially millennials and Gen Z. 71% of consumers think brands and retailers have the potential to positively impact society, and about 60% believe brands have a social responsibility to speak out and take action on important issues. 

Sharing your mission — whether it’s sustainability-focused, supporting specific social causes, or being a top-notch place to work — across social media sites and on your e-commerce site helps build trust and emotional connections with shoppers. 

When you share your mission and commitment to important causes, it makes your brand more relatable to the public. This will do wonders for your brand reputation. According to a Sprout Social report, 64% of consumers want to connect with brands, and 53% feel connected when a brand’s values align with their own. 

Communicating your mission also helps you control the narrative that surrounds your brand and lets you present your values in an authoritative and accurate way. 

5. Embrace visual and social content 

Authentic experiences are important to today’s shoppers. They like to see products in real-world settings — clothing modeled by real people and consumers demonstrating how something works. Actually, 40% of shoppers won’t purchase if a product page lacks UGC. Consumers seek out customer photos on product pages, search engines, social media, and other websites that sell the items.

Deploying the right visual and social content across every channel where your brand can be found engages shoppers and promotes a positive brand reputation. 

Displaying authentic imagery from real shoppers on your e-commerce site does more than just improve your brand reputation. When consumers interact with visual content on-site, shoppers spend more time on the website, buy more, and conversion rates soar.

For example, Le Col has seen average order value increase by 13%, revenue per visitor by 155%, and conversion rate by 125% when shoppers engage with UGC. 

6. Optimize creative product pages

Shoppers want to feel confident that anything they buy will meet their needs, and they rely on product descriptions to provide all the information they need. When product detail pages lack details, it’s so frustrating for consumers that they abandon their shopping cart. 

A whopping 98% of shoppers say they’ve been dissuaded from purchasing something because a product page didn’t have enough information. Not including detailed descriptions or including incorrect information can weaken your reputation and drive up your return rates. 

Highlight a product’s key features and use sensory wording that’s relatable to consumers. Include details about how an item works, how it’ll help in consumers’ daily lives, and the results that it will provide. Featuring visual UGC, reviews, and questions and answers helps shoppers make quick (but well-informed) decisions and inspires loyalty. 

7. Step up your SEO tactics 

A significant amount of shopping journeys start on search engines, like Google. So, it’s crucial to optimize your SEO strategy to ensure your brand gets noticed at this critical stage. Producing high-quality, SEO-centric content on your website will help you stand out. So, your brand reputation management process should factor in SEO, including how you’ll monitor negative online search results and what action you’ll take. 

You can gather insights into the wording that shoppers use to search for your products and describe how they meet their needs from syndicating reviews and other UGC. This information can then be used to create your SEO strategy around user sentiment and keep up with Google’s algorithm changes. 

8. Monitor your reviews on other websites

The more ratings and reviews that your products have, the more likely shoppers will be inspired to purchase. But, your website isn’t the only place where people can leave reviews. A key part of your brand reputation management strategy should be to keep an eye on what consumers are saying about you everywhere reviews can be posted. Channels like social media, Yelp, or your Google seller rating.

With thousands of reviews likely to pop up on multiple platforms, overseeing it all can be overwhelming. If you need help, a ratings and reviews platform can streamline everything. The right tools feature built-in insights and analytics to help you quickly identify themes and problems that could affect your brand reputation. As well as ways to take action to improve the sentiment around your brand.

9. Focus on top-notch customer service

Happy customers keep coming back. The best way to keep your most loyal shoppers happy is with proactive customer service and unique, personalized customer experiences. Customers are actually starting to expect these experiences from brands, with 25% of consumers saying they’re interested in personalization in shopping.

Getting it right — which involves actively listening to consumers and quickly resolving any problems that come up — offers endless benefits, including higher customer satisfaction and conversion rates, which translates to a stellar brand reputation. 

The most loyal customers tend to use words like “happy,” “love,” and “adore” when discussing their favorite brands. This kind of customer sentiment resonates with other shoppers and helps attract new ones. When happy customers share something positive about your brand on social media, for example, reward them with a special discount or other perk or highlight their stories on your website.

Showing appreciation for your best customers will amplify your brand and reinforce your reputation. 

10. Crack down on fake reviews

Nearly all shoppers (97%) say fake reviews make them lose trust in a brand, according to our research of 10,000 global consumers. That’s significant because 81% of shoppers also say they’d never use a brand again after losing trust in it. And they’re getting better at spotting fake reviews:

Cracking down on fake reviews associated with your brand is an essential part of your reputation management. Effective tactics include:

• Don’t allow fake reviews. Sounds obvious, but don’t be tempted to allow fake reviews just because they may be positive. Use an in-house our third-party content moderation service to screen them out
• Keep on top of legislation. Fake reviews are becoming so prevalent that new regulations are constantly being drawn up. For example, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently proposed new regulations to crack down on fake reviews
• Never incentivize positive reviews. You can ask customers for reviews (and you should!) but never offer financial reward for a positive review. If you do incentivize a review, through a coupon for example, then make sure to add a disclaimer to the review

Brand reputation management case studies

1. Retail giant River Island keeps on top of its brand reputation management through authentic visual content. The brand wanted to provide an authentic shopping experience for customers so they incorporated visual UGC onto their homepage, landing pages, and product pages. Visitors that engaged with this visual UGC on the brand’s site drove a 184% increase conversion rates
2. Hairhouse wanted to build a web presence that today’s shoppers expect by providing social proof through honest reviews. Not only did implementing reviews provide this, but the brand ensured only authentic, genuine reviews were featured. This real life social proof from shoppers inspired other shoppers to make purchases and led to a 35% increase in conversion rate.

Get a head start on your brand reputation management

These days, with consumers always-on, you can’t ignore your brand reputation. Taking the opportunity to listen and respond to customers, in both positive and negative situations, is crucial for growth. Follow these steps, repeat them and repeat them again and again — brand reputation management is an ongoing process. But a worthy one.

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Masterclass: How to uphold your brand’s reputation in the digital age

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And while almost all shoppers use ratings and reviews (88%) to evaluate or learn more about products, fake reviews are affecting their ability to confidently turn to reviews as a trusted source when making product purchasing decisions.

And preserving that trust isn’t just about maintaining your customer base and increasing sales. It’s also about maintaining regulatory compliance. Government agencies all over the world enforce consumer protection laws that prohibit unscrupulous marketing practices — including fake, deceptive or misleading reviews.

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently announced two important regulations they’re taking to battle fake reviews:

1. They published the final Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. This is the first refresh of the Guides since 2009 and it provides new and updated guidance around endorsements by social media influencers as well as ratings and reviews 
2. The proposed Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials which clarifies what constitutes a “fake” review

What does the proposed FTC regulation say?

The new regulation proposed by the FTC will strengthen the agency’s ability to impose significant monetary penalties in cases involving fake and deceptive consumer reviews — up to $50,120 for each offending review to be imposed each time the review is viewed by a consumer. The aim is to ensure that consumers are provided with a more authentic, honest shopping experience and businesses are able to better protect their brand.

In its notice of proposed regulation, the FTC explained the need for the new rule by citing examples of clearly deceptive practices from its recent cases. They specifically called out the widespread emergence of generative AI, which will make it easier for bad actors to create fake reviews.

According to the FTC’s Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, “Our proposed rule on fake reviews shows that we’re using all available means to attack deceptive advertising in the digital age” and “should help level the playing field for honest companies.”

The proposed new rule clarifies that businesses are prohibited from:

• Selling or obtaining fake consumer reviews and testimonials. Writing or selling reviews by someone who doesn’t exist or has never bought the product
• Review hijacking. Using or repurposing a consumer review written for one product so that it appears to have been written for a substantially different product
• Buying positive or negative reviews. Providing compensation conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative
• Illegally suppressing negative reviews. Using unjustified legal threats, other intimidation, or false accusations to prevent or remove a negative consumer review or hiding a negative review from the website
• Using “insider” reviews. Having employees or other insiders write reviews or testimonials of its products or services, without clearly disclosing their relationships
• Selling or buying fake social media indicators. Selling false indicators of social media influence, like fake followers or views
• Fake websites. Creating or controlling a website that claims to provide independent opinions about a category of products or services that includes its own products or services

As the champions of authentic shopping experiences, we at Bazaarvoice fully agree with the premise of this proposed rule and already provide our customers with powerful tools and processes to help them comply. This is simply another strong and welcomed step to help protect brands and the sanctity of consumer reviews and the role they play in commerce.

3 ways to protect your brand

Whether you’re in the US or another country, here’s the three golden rules we instruct our clients and partners to follow, to ensure they protect their brand, and their bottom line, from fake reviews.

1. Be transparent about who you collect reviews from, and how you do it

While consumers continue to trust reviews, they’re increasingly on the lookout for any signs of untrustworthy content. Typically, the behaviors that causes the most suspicion among consumers are:

• Multiple reviews with similar wording on the same product (55%)
• Review content not matching the product (49%) 
• Bad grammar/spelling mistakes (36%) 
• An overwhelming amount of five star/positive reviews (35%) 

Consumers have a right to trust the reviews they encounter and businesses have a responsibility to ensure this content is legitimate. The importance of this trust is further echoed in the guidance being put out by governments and consumer agencies around the world, echoed by the proposed FTC regulation. 

There’s a variety of ways businesses can ask customers to provide a review — review request emails, directly from e-commerce sites, sampling campaigns, or in a social media campaign. Additionally, brands may choose to share the reviews they collect with their retail partners so that consumers can find them anywhere they’re looking to make a purchasing decision. 

Regardless of how a review is collected, brands should never ask for or incentivize positive reviews. If consumers are offered a free product, promotional material (such as discounts or coupons), or a chance to win something of value in exchange for providing an unbiased review, then we recommend adding descriptors such as “this reviewer received a free product in exchange for their honest feedback” to any reviews collected using a promotion. 

2. Don’t screen out negative reviews — find value in them 

While some might think that negative reviews are an absolute disaster for their brand to have, they’re actually a necessity for your ratings and reviews program to thrive. In a survey we ran, over half (60%) of respondents said that negative reviews are as important as positive reviews in their decision to buy a product. The majority claimed that negative reviews contain more detailed info on product pros and cons, while 32% think that they are less likely to be fake reviews.

In addition to giving consumers a true feel for a product or service, negative reviews are an opportunity for engaging with consumers and identifying potential product improvements. 

Responding to, and taking action on, negative feedback will protect your brand by fostering trust and loyalty with customers.

3. Have a zero tolerance policy for fake reviews

Not protecting yourself against fake reviews undoubtedly puts your brand at risk. In the same research as above, respondents said that fraudulent reviews from a brand’s employees (42%) and from other customers (34%) would cause them to lose trust in a brand.

We also found that after losing trust in a brand, a vast majority (82%) of consumers would avoid using the brand ever again. If shoppers suspect a product to have fake reviews:

• 36% wouldn’t buy the product
• 28% wouldn’t trust the brand,
• 27% wouldn’t trust the site’s other reviews
• 25% wouldn’t purchase from the website
• 18% said ‘all of the above’

Companies should be aware of the possibility of fraudulent content through a variety of means, including disruptive or trolling activity, commercial messages, generative AI submissions, illegitimate or degrading content by a competitor, and self-promotion by employees.

We help protect our clients from a variety of different types of fraud. Using textual moderation and data driven, anti-fraud processes to evaluate reviews in the Bazaarvoice Network helps us to protect our clients and their shoppers. 

Our biggest and best piece of advice to protect your brand is to ensure you have a process in place to detect fake reviews, and to not allow them to be posted on your site. Hiring a third-party ratings and reviews provider and moderator is a huge help for this task. 

Protect your brand now

User-generated content is necessary in commerce today. But a reputation for fake reviews will damage your brand reputation as well as your bottom line. Brands and retailers need to continuously and proactively work to combat fake reviews by ensuring they have the right processes in place to protect themselves and their shoppers.

The steps we’ve outlined above, as well as the new guidance and proposed regulation from the FTC, will help you achieve this.

When shoppers can turn to ratings and reviews as sources of truth, it helps them to feel confident in purchasing from your company. Which boosts your bottom line and who doesn’t want that?

Learn more at Bazaarvoice.com/fakereviews.

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The authenticity movement: building consumer trust without fake reviews

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Chapters:

1. What is a brand ambassador?
2. Why you need an ambassador for your brand
3. How to identify and market to your ideal brand ambassador
4. Six ways to nurture relationships with brand ambassadors
5. Examples of successful brand ambassador partnerships
6. Use the power of UGC to find your brand ambassadors

Picture this: you’re scrolling through your Instagram, and you come across two different ads. One’s an obviously paid endorsement for some shapewear worn by a celebrity, but the other’s an ad with a person who seems more like a peer you’d meet at a kids’ playgroup or the grocery store. 

Which option seems more believable to you? Likely, it’s the person who isn’t all over your TV or your social media platforms already. That person is a brand ambassador — and they can unlock a series of benefits for your business, too.

Harness the power of ambassador marketing for your e-commerce business to build brand awareness, create more authentic relationships with your audience, and increase product sales.

What is a brand ambassador?

A brand ambassador works with a brand to represent it in a positive light while promoting its products or services. They help create an emotional connection between that brand and its customers.

For example, the online children’s clothing store Heart Blaster uses an ambassador who goes by DJ K Sprinkles. She’s a 17-year-old who plays at events across the country and shares her experiences with the brand on social media and in-person. 

“We connected through social media and initially supported each other’s pages. I admired K Sprinkles for her fun spirit, ambition, and her work ethic. Most importantly, our values and ethical principles align in a community effort,” said Sophillia Tagaban, CEO of Heart Blaster. 

DJ K Sprinkles promotes Heart Blaster clothing and its mission to commit to treating all people equally. And in return, the brand provides her with free merchandise and partnerships through her own personalized link. 

“Kaitlyn is a growing teenager who understands the importance of advocacy,” Tagaban said. “The kind of advocacy that helps us connect with people.”

Brand ambassadors will share their stories and experiences with your brand on their social media channels, whether it’s on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. They also might attend live events and conferences to promote your products and services in person — DJ K Sprinkles is attending NAAM Music Festival this year and will talk about Heart Blaster while she’s there.

Sometimes, brand ambassadors may be college students. They’ll share your brand’s products with others on their school campus. Others might be subject matter experts in an industry and you can use them to promote niche products to their audience. Organizations might also elect to use employees as ambassadors.

No matter how the ambassador represents your brand, they should be compensated in return. Usually, it’s free products, some kind of discount, or even monetary rewards.

Brand ambassador vs. celebrity influencer

Brand ambassadors and celebrity influencers both promote products, but the main difference lies in the amount of influence they have. 

A celebrity influencer has a large social media following and can reach a global audience (think about how many people follow the Kardashian-Jenner clan) to market a brand through paid advertisements. 

Brand ambassadors have a smaller following, usually more targeted to a certain demographic. In this example from Barks and Crafts, see how they’re searching for brand ambassadors who are specifically active in the Instagram dog and cat community. They want ambassadors who can reach their target audience of pet owners vs. a larger untargeted following.

Why you need an ambassador for your brand

If you want to build trust with your audience and increase sales through your social media channels, then you need a brand ambassador — and in some cases, more than one. When you have the right person advocating for your brand, they can: 

• Build authenticity with your audience: A brand ambassador will provide honest feedback about your products and services to your target market, making their posts more believable. Potential customers see their user-generated content, and not just your company’s product photos or a super famous celebrity who’s known to cash in on every and any deal that comes their way. It makes it easier to connect with your audience and build relationships based on trust
• Help increase sales and ROI: 35% of people say their purchases are influenced by social media ads. But if those ads aren’t grabbing their attention, they’ll move on to ones that do. Your brand ambassadors will create content that the audience can relate to so they’ll engage with your brand online. The ambassador already has a small, niche audience that trusts them and their recommendations, meaning they’re more likely to convince people to buy from you. Also, your ambassadors can drive that audience to make a purchase with a discount code 

How to identify and market to your ideal brand ambassador

Looking for a brand ambassador involves a few important steps, whether you’re recruiting via social media or talking to existing customers. 

Search for people in your target audience 

You want an ambassador that your target audience will identify with, which means your brand ambassador should also be in that group. Think back to our shapewear example above. Women who are looking for shapewear want to see someone who looks like them in an ad. It gives them a better idea of how the product will actually work for them, rather than on a celebrity who has personal trainers and nutrition plans (and probably plastic surgery ).

Look for people in your target audience who have a decent following on Instagram, TikTok, and other social channels. You can search through your followers on each platform or reach out to people directly. 

Another way to find ambassadors who will hype up your brand: search in your existing customer base. Use user-generated content (UGC) and look for hashtags associated with your brand to find loyal customers who are already engaged with your brand and ask them to be ambassadors.

Or you can look at people who participate in your customer loyalty programs. If they’re already in love with your brand, they might be willing to help.

Advertise your search on social media

Many e-commerce stores post on their social media pages about their brand ambassador searches. Encourage people to apply so that you’ll have a large pool of potential candidates. This strategy has the added benefit of reaching people who already follow you and are thus likely to be part of your target audience. 

Post about the search and include all necessary qualifications so the applicants know what’s going on upfront. For example, baby accessories brand Bubby Bow Company tells potential candidates from the beginning that they’d need photos of their kids modeling bows and other accessories. 

Give a due date for submissions and have candidates create a video to show you how and why they’d be a great fit for your brand. If they’re going to make content for your business and you’re paying them in some way, you need to make sure you’re getting the right person for the job.

Use agency tools to help you find candidates

Sometimes you might need help to locate ambassadors or track their ROI, and the right agency or company can do that for you. Heart Blaster worked with PR teams in the past with some success, Tagaban said.

There’s several companies out there that specialize in finding or recruiting different types of brand ambassadors, such as:

• Brandbassador: This brand ambassador marketing software tracks each ambassador in your program, provides metrics on their performance, and keeps ambassadors engaged through gamification 
• Campus Commandos: If you’re looking specifically for student ambassadors, Campus Commandos helps put brand ambassadors on college campuses. They’ll recruit them for you and manage the entire process from start to finish 
• Roster: The ambassador management platform Roster lets you collect UGC, reward ambassadors, and recruit new ones. If you also use influencers, you can manage them on the platform as well
• Premier Staff: If you’re marketing at an in-person event and need people to get your products out to the masses, Premier Staff helps find brand ambassadors for corporate events
• Influenster: While not specifically a brand ambassador marketing business, Influenster is made up of an engaged community already advocating for their favorite brands — one of those could be yours

Six ways to nurture relationships with brand ambassadors

Once your ambassadors are on board, you’ll need to find ways to keep them engaged and work on your relationship with them. They’re putting in the work for your brand, so make sure you’re rewarding them and tracking how their efforts impact your business.

“It is important to us that we support our influencers just as much in return,” Tagaban said about her Heart Blaster reps.  

1. Hire a community manager

If you have the budget for it, bring in someone who is responsible for overseeing your entire ambassador community, like a community manager. This person will handle every ambassador question or concern. Giving ambassadors one point of contact makes the process much simpler when they need to reach out to your company about a specific campaign and other important matters.

A community manager will also make sure the ambassadors’ marketing efforts align with your company’s marketing strategy and overall goals. Other staff members may not always have time to monitor every social media channel, and it’s important to guarantee your ambassadors are presenting your brand in the best possible light. If there’s an issue, that manager can contact the ambassador and assist them. 

Along with that, your community manager can also recruit new ambassadors and keep current ambassadors engaged with rewards and other campaigns.

2. Offer discounts or free merchandise

Your brand ambassadors need something to entice them to sign up, so give them discounts on purchases or offer free merchandise based on their performance. It’s a way to reward them for their work. An added bonus of discount codes is that you’re still bringing in revenue from their purchases. 

You can also offer discount codes for them to share with their followers. Doing this encourages ambassadors to remain enthusiastic about your brand and partnership and keeps them posting about you regularly, which will bring in new business from their followers.

3. Give ambassadors commission on purchases they encourage

We know Biggie said, “Mo’ money, mo’ problems,” but for those of us in the normal world, that doesn’t usually apply, right? 

Money motivates us all, let’s be honest, so use that motivation to encourage your ambassadors to make sales off a link made just for them. That way, you can track the sales they bring in and give them a commission off those purchases. They’ll up their efforts to sell your products, which then increases the ROI from your partnership, as well as an increase in your profits. That’s a solid win-win.

4. Let ambassadors build their professional network

Brand ambassadors want to build their network just like any other professional in their field of work. Offer them networking incentives if they reach a certain sales threshold, or if they post a certain amount of times. Give ambassadors the chance to meet with your CEO or other company leaders, or to get career counseling and mentorship from them. 

Another option is to host either in-person or virtual networking events so they can connect with your other brand ambassadors. While they’re there, let them swap strategies and ideas. After all, that helps your brand build a better online presence if they’re learning from each other and collaborating.

5. Provide exclusive access to new products

The whole point of a brand ambassador is to hype up your brand, so in the wise words of Bonnie Raitt, “let’s give them something to talk about.” 

First, offer them exclusive access to your new products and product lines. Think about how excited you’d be if your favorite brand let you try out their new line before it was released to the public. That’s how your ambassadors will feel. They’ll show it off on social to their followers, which will help build up that anticipation. Have them share the drop date for your new items, or offer their followers early access through their custom link. 

This helps create more buzz for your brand, and also rewards your ambassadors since they get exclusive items before anyone else.

6. Gamify the ambassador process to keep them engaged

Games are addicting. Who hasn’t played hours of Candy Crush Saga when they were supposed to be working instead? Or spent too much time (and money) trying to get enough stars in the Starbucks app to get that free drink? Use that to your advantage when you work with brand ambassadors through gamification marketing. 

Xbox and gaming go hand-in-hand, and they use gamification to reward their ambassadors with special reward points. As their points accumulate, they move up levels. And for someone who already loves gaming, that’s an incentive in itself. Ambassadors can redeem points for exclusive Xbox swag or digital items.

This tactic works for smaller businesses too. While your brand may not have as much game as Xbox, you can still offer reward points to your ambassadors for completing certain tasks, like generating different levels of sales or adding new followers to your company’s Instagram account. Let them use their points toward your store’s products.

Examples of successful brand ambassador partnerships

If you need some ideas on how to build your brand ambassador partnerships, check out some inspiration from these real-life companies that have found different ways to reward their ambassadors.

Patagonia

Patagonia takes a slightly different approach to using brand ambassadors, as the company is working to try and reduce its carbon footprint. Through its Worn Wear program, it encourages brand ambassadors to show ways they’ve fixed their worn-out clothing. 

It seems to be working well, as Patagonia has established itself as one of the world’s most sustainable brands. Using brand ambassadors to talk about the company and its practices shows new customers that Patagonia is truly passionate about its social responsibility and true to its brand values.

Lululemon

Lululemon is a very popular brand of workout and fitness clothing, and they build their ambassadorships locally through each store as they believe in fostering a sense of community. 

They look for candidates who embody the “sweat life,” made up of three pillars: sweat, grow, and connect. Each ambassador receives the latest Lululemon apparel, gets development tools, and a chance to network with like-minded people. 

3. Red Bull

Red Bull may give you wings, but it also has a pretty solid brand ambassador program for in-person events, restaurants, clubs, and more. They call their ambassadors Muskateers, and want to build long-term partnerships with them. Musketeers get to attend exclusive events and meet with managers of the coolest clubs in their area as they work to promote Red Bull. 

Along with Muskateers, Red Bull also works with student marketeers on college campuses across the country. These college brand ambassadors get chances to network and build their sales and marketing skills while earning a degree. Some even go on to work full-time for Red Bull.

Bumble

Swipe right for a chance to be a Bumble Honey, aka brand ambassadors who act on behalf of the popular dating app. Bumble Honeys promote the app on their college campuses as a part of Bumble’s goal to help people cultivate meaningful relationships. 

These brand ambassadors plan events, give out Bumble merch, and get to work with Bumble’s staff on marketing campaigns. Honeys are compensated and also get bonuses like gift cards and travel vouchers.

Sephora

Sephora uses the power of user-generated content to form its own Superhero Squad — aptly named the Sephora Squad. The beauty company encourages customers to sign up for all the #squadgoals where they’ll be a part of a larger community full of diverse members. 

Every year, Sephora selects a few applicants to partner with, and they’ll do a paid partnership with them. Members can go to their Los Angeles Creator Lounge, as well as get one-on-one training with Sephora staff. Even after their year is up, Sephora Squad members can still get alumni perks. 

Use the power of UGC to find your brand ambassadors

Chances are, your customers are already posting a wealth of great content about your brand on social media. User-generated content, whether it’s on social or an online review, is a powerful way to find those customers and turn them into champions for your brand. 

Search for customers who are already raving about you by tapping into existing communities. Once you find those people who love your company, reach out and reward them for their loyalty by turning them into official brand ambassadors.

The Influenster App, for example, is an engaged community of over 7.5 million members, who create over a million pieces of authentic content about brands every month. They’re already advocating for your brand, you just need to tap into it.

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