Your brand’s reputation is more than a number on a dashboard according Lyndall Spooner, founder and CEO of insights firm 5D.
Boards and marketing teams are increasingly obsessed with measuring brand reputation. The result is a proliferation of standardised metrics and benchmarked scores that reduce something complex and historically rich to a single comparable number – and every organisation in every category ends up chasing the same generic reputation profile, as if there were a universal formula for a strong brand.
Your brand reputation is your legacy. It’s not a KPI; legacies don’t behave like metrics. To understand why, you need to think about brands across three distinct dimensions: brand promise, brand experience, and brand reputation.
Brand promise is the future. It’s the story you tell about where you’re going, your vision, your positioning, what you are committing to deliver.
Brand experience is the present. It’s what customers actually encounter when they interact with you today. The reality check between where you’ve been and where you say you’re headed.
Brand reputation is the past. Not what you say, not what you do today, but everything that happened before now, and the meaning people attached to it. It accumulates across every interaction, decision and response that came before.
Brand reputation is shaped by the moments that mattered – the crises and how you responded, the innovations, the standout experiences, good or bad, that people carry with them. It takes a long time to build and can be destroyed quickly. It is also resistant to change: the older the brand, the more weight its history carries.
That’s what makes brand reputation both a powerful asset and a complicated one. It may not reflect how well the brand is performing today. It can look very different to existing customers than to people who have never dealt with you. And it can be a genuine brake on growth, with old perceptions making it harder to move the brand forward.
You can be delivering a strong experience today and still carry a weak reputation from the past. Or the reverse: coasting on goodwill built years ago while the current product or service no longer warrants it. That gap between what a brand does now and what people believe about it is where marketing mistakes are made. Every brand promise is judged against what people are experiencing today and what they remember from the past. If your promise doesn’t fit your reputation, it won’t land.
A brand that claims innovation but has no history of it will be met with scepticism. A brand that promises integrity but has broken trust will be questioned. Everything you say next is measured against what people already remember – that’s reputation doing its job. It’s rarely a lack of creative thinking that holds brands back; it’s the gap between the story they want to tell and the one their audience already believes.
Not every failure becomes part of a brand’s reputation. A well-handled crisis can fade into the background. A poorly handled one can define the brand for years. Often the crisis itself matters far less than the response to it.
What shapes reputation most is not individual events but patterns of behaviour – the way a brand consistently shows up over time.
There has been a push to reduce brand reputation to a neat, comparable score – another data point on a growth dashboard. The problem is that a score strips out the things that matter most: a brand’s unique history, the context behind its strengths and weaknesses, the depth of its real equity, and any understanding of what is actually preventing it from delivering on its future promise.
A score tells you where you stand. It doesn’t tell you why, or what story from your past you’re carrying forward into everything you do next.
Your reputation is the sum of everything that came before: what you are known for across your capabilities (product, service, value), your character (integrity, trust, intent), and the significant moments – good and bad – that shaped how people see you.
So what should marketers do with all of this? First, accept that brand reputation is a lag indicator. It is not the primary lever for growth. It is built by getting the basics right, consistently, over time.
Second, treat reputation as something to understand deeply rather than just measure superficially. What history are you inheriting? What do people believe about the brand, and why? Which of those beliefs are working in your favour, and which are holding you back?
Third, use your past to your advantage. The job is not to ignore reputation or pretend it isn’t there, but to use it, leaning into what is positive, addressing what is limiting, and anchoring the future promise in something the audience can recognise and believe.
Brand reputation is the foundation for building something distinctively your own. It is the story of a brand’s journey from its beginning to today. Don’t confuse it with current brand performance, and don’t expect to shift it quickly.
Building brand reputation is slow work. It accumulates gradually, compounds over time, and often outlasts the tenures of the people who shaped it. Treat it not as a KPI but as an asset you have a responsibility to protect and guide into the future.
There is a saying often attributed to a Greek proverb: “A society grows great when people plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
Brand reputation is built through years of promises made and kept, experiences delivered consistently, and decisions taken well under pressure. It cannot be managed quarter to quarter. The right question is whether you understand the history of the brand you are responsible for… and whether you are building one worth inheriting.
