Today, brand is no longer about a logo and print collateral. Brand is a feeling a client gets when they interact with you. Brand is the personality of the company as an entity in itself, independent from its employees.
If your company were a person, a living, breathing being, what would it be? A woman, a man, asexual? Active and happy, relaxed and calm, intense and professional? The goal of the brand is not to create a company people like, not really. The goal is to create a person people like clothed in your company’s aesthetic.
Over the past decade a growing trend has moved companies towards attempting a "grassroots" attitude. The purpose of this attitude is to reconnect with prospective customers and make them feel like the company is one of them with the customers' best interests in mind.
The biggest problem with this is that most of the time it's a lie. Those companies are corporations who care more about their bottom line than anything else, and their new-found roots are simply another method to garner business. People are becoming wise to this tactic, and not only was it immoral in the first place but those companies are going to be in trouble when customers realize they've been lied to.
Now, this is not to say that having the bottom line as priority one is not a good thing. It's a business model that works for some companies, I'm not here to judge that. The problem is trying to sound like a company you're not. People are going to find out, with how much information is available about your company online this is inevitable.
The grassroots attempt is one of the many, many attempts companies have used since the creation of radio and television to make customers like them more. "Product X is fun for the whole family!" "Product Y is better than all its competitors!" "Product Z will make all your friends envious!" etc. The list is a long one, and they're fine as long as they're true.
The time has long passed for total transparency. With over 1/6 of the planet using some form of social media, there's no point in being anything but transparent. Honesty isn't just the best policy, it's the only policy. If your company slips up once with the wrong customer and whatever you've done contradicts your entire brand's philosophy, suddenly you're in the middle of a PR disaster when the twitter #fail hash is paired with your company name hundreds of times and everyone's Facebook has a link share to a news story.
The vast majority of people like honesty. If they feel like they can trust you as a company, they'll be more prone to trust your products. If your product has a defect, fess up to it as soon as its discovered and vow to make it right instead of trying to keep it quiet. If there's a bad customer experience, apologize for it. If you're a small company, don't act like a big one or vice-versa (someones going to find out either way). As long as you're honest most people will continue to trust your company even when you do screw up because most people understand that no one is immune to mistakes.
The easiest way to gain trust aside from making quality products and being transparent about your business is to create a business personality customers like. We'll go over that in part two.
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