Reputation is an unusual and challenging marketing topic. Great reputations for integrity and quality clearly can be exceptionally helpful but the story also can be truly complex because your reputation carries only so much weight within the marketing space.
I’ve seen a few situations (within the trades and business overall) where I’ve picked up some incredibly negative industry scuttlebutt about business owners who appear to be impressively effective marketers. To make things even more interesting, their business dealings with me and the people I know are excellent, in fact far better than the people who have dissed them. The complicating element is the “dissers” seem, as well, to have generally stellar reputations.
In another example, a prominent local tax lawyer recommended me to an associate in an offshore jurisdiction. When I showed up at this guy’s office (during a day’s break from my honeymoon vacation in 1993), the trust company officer told me how he faked numbers, pulled tricks and generally assisted in any form of tax evasion possible. I duly wrote about my experience in my business newspaper and without a hint of dishonor, wrote off a sizable portion of my honeymoon costs. (After all, this story could not be researched and written without a face-to-face meeting, so my own travel costs plus at least two night’s hotel would be valid business expenses.)
A few years later, the person I interviewed received a visit from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who picked him up on drug and money laundering charges. His appealed his conviction all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court but lost when the Court ruled that, indeed, Canadian authorities could co-operate with the British West Indies Police in the active search of his offshore offices (a great assignment for the Police team, especially if they worked during the middle of the Canadian winter.) The lawyer who recommended him, meanwhile, is still very much in business as a tax practitioner. I shudder to think about what happened to the clients he sent offshore when Police pulled all the files from that offshore tropical office.
Reputation can be debated, it can be earned, and it can be situational (in other words you can be great in some circumstances and a really nasty person in others.) None of us are perfect, I expect, or we would work for a religious order or non-profit rather than operate a business.
But reputation, marketing and branding all go together in the real picture, because your “brand” is the tangible marketing result of your reputation. If it is good people pay a premium just because they “know” you are worth more than the competition, even though your services may or may not actually be of better real value. The great brand is the reward for great marketing. So, yes, in certain circumstances, you can use marketing resources and power to buy your reputation.
However, most readers in this space probably have a great reputation but don’t recognize its true branding power. Maybe you are too humble to turn the spontaneous testimonials and “great work” observations into marketing resources. You may, worse of all, “rely” on word-of-mouth and repeat business for your day-to-day business results. Marketing, you think, is beneath your dignity and reputation (and when you try any form of organized marketing or advertising, you find it is overwhelmingly inexpensive and fails to deliver worthy results.)
In this situation, I ask you to step back and think about how you can work with your existing clients to capture your good reputation and bottle it in your marketing package. Instead of relying on referrals, collect solid testimonials, and then post them on your website. Instead of passively hoping people will do business with you, work with your most valuable clients to send out letters of introduction to introduce you to new business. And take your observations about your best clients — their interests, associations, media they read and so on — and apply these insights to your marketing and advertising. Finally, look within your business community (and perhaps among your clients) for places where you can co-operatively emarket through joint venture initiatives. All of this stuff initially will cost virtually no money and when you get to the point of spending money on advertising and more expensive marketing resources, you will find your results are much better.
So can you get away with a bad reputation and still be successful at marketing? Certainly. But if you have a great reputation and apply some of the principals used by the people with (what you feel to be) bad reputations, you will have the best of both words, an earned great reputation and a great marketing brand. And you won’t struggle, hoping your phone rings simply because you have done great work in the past.