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Sintibale Zulu and Morris Mpala
In the introductory article we outlined the true meaning of a brand. To recap; a brand is an emotional bond that connects people with products and services. Brands are visual, emotional, rational and cultural images that consumers associate with an individual company or product. A brand is your reputation. Ultimately, branding is the practice of building trust between a place or community and its collective audience — businesses, visitors, the local community, the press, etc.

Brand credibility is defined as the believability of the product position information contained in a brand, which entails “consistently delivering what is promised”. Based on this definition, brand credibility has two dimensions: trustworthiness and expertise. Consumers perceive that the brand has the ability — expertise — and willingness — trustworthiness — to consistently deliver what it has promised; failing to do so would gradually erode the brand equity — brand equity is a subject matter for another article!

Consumers buy brands because they believe in them. This is true for a branded product or a branded service. When consumers don’t trust a brand they do not buy or consume it. One of the biggest reasons for people buying a brand repeatedly is the credibility the brand has among consumers.

In brand building, credibility is vital to the success of any brand.

Today consumers are focusing on tried, tested and trusted brands.

Benefits of a credible brand are:
Creation of longevity of 100 years and beyond
Building an incredible amount of equity

Brand credibility is often pointed out as one psychological factor that triggers the buying impulse of consumers. However, just like with any type of trigger, it can produce a positive or negative effect. In this case, it refers to your brand’s reputation and its ability (or inability) to convert that into sales.

Business owners must try to change their perspective into that of the consumer. Try to understand how you would perceive various companies and how this would affect your purchasing decisions.

Establishing Credibility
Now that you understand what brand credibility is, you must face the harder question: how do you establish and continually nurture it? This is even more difficult for start-ups because the stark truth is it takes some doing to build brand equity but it’s not insurmountable.

Credibility is the heart of every business. Even though you offer quality products or services, if your customers perceive your company as incapable of delivering such level of quality, then it would be of no use. It would not be able to confirm your business as a reliable choice among several possible competing choices in the market.

The following categories are building blocks to brand credibility and would be unpacked later in the series:

1. Non-verbal such as your logo or image
2. Verbal efforts through marketing or advertising
3. Mission and Vision of the business to exemplify your organisation’s values and,
4. Internal operations that is crucial in delivering your promises to the customer.

Brand Credibility in the Internet Age
Brands today are facing a real credibility crisis as consumers are putting brand positioning claims, marketing rhetoric and advertising to the ultimate torture test — thanks in no small measure to the web’s peer-to-peer, open-source, easily searchable environment.

It’s not getting any easier to manage in fact, it’s far from it. All the conversational tools that marketers wax poetic about in industry speeches and trade publications are being used to dial up scrutiny, expose weaknesses and even to embarrass brands.

Brands are in a credibility crisis with consumers losing faith that brands are credible and brands not working hard enough to understand and nurture credibility. In today’s environment, the most important asset businesses can nurture is credibility.

Credibility might not be on your balance sheet, but it’s the only asset you’ve got. It’s the only valid currency in this vast and increasingly noisy marketplace.

Drivers of Brand Credibility: How do you build credibility in your brand?

The answer is revealed in the six-step strategy below:

Step 1: The first element in the recommended six-step process is to make sure that you have a good product and a good service which gives benefits to the consumer so it becomes highly valued by them. This is crucial because only a good product or a good service can become a good credible brand. If the product itself is bad, no amount of advertising can lend it credibility. In fact, things could go south and it could end up being not only a waste of money but a waste of precious time.

Step 2: The second step is to ensure that the product or service experience during usage by the consumer is positive. This leads to the consumer recalling the brand pleasantly. It’s often said that the true taste of the pudding is in the eating. Similarly, consumers believe in a product when they have a positive experience with it. No amount of claims would give credibility as much as a pleasant brand experience where the consumer experiences that brand.

Step 3: The third step is to ensure regular and consistent customer satisfaction and not just a once-off good experience. Credibility is built over a period of time. Consumers believe in your brand if they constantly get good utility and value from it. Inconsistent performance or not providing regular great service leads to irregularity, which could lead to customers not having faith in your brand.

Step 4: The fourth step in our recommended strategy is to make sure that your brand meets and delivers the promise it makes to customers at all times. There should not be a case of over-promise even if you have a very good product or service. Over-promise reduces reliability leading to discontent, thereby affecting credibility.

Step 5: The fifth step would be to provide evidence in the form of facts or statistics to make the consumer believe in all benefits on offer.

Step 6: The final and the sixth element of our recommended strategy for credibility is generating good word-of-mouth publicity wherein satisfied customers speak well of you informally or formally through testimonials.

This definitely enhances credibility. Social Proof and Consumer Generated Media (CGM) are two strong tools that provide unsolicited testimonials from consumers through social media channels — these are additional great article pieces for the future!

In closing
Customers absolutely hate being misled. Make a genuine mistake and chances are that they will not hold it against you. So long as a brand is sincere, chances are that the customer won’t mind an honest error. But the customer must be absolutely sure that the brand is acting purely in his best interests.

A brand that is genuine and sincere can be said to be “pure”. It acts without ulterior motives. It ensures that the entire brand experience is transparent and practises it without deception. Customers trust the brand implicitly and often follow advice almost blindly because of the faith instilled in them. Advice is normally sound and on the off-chance that a genuine mistake is made, customers are more than willing to forgive and forget.

To portray a pure brand more accurately, perhaps it would do well to contrast it with its direct opposite which would be a phony brand with superficial concern for customers. This brand would be a confidence trickster who would take customers for a ride because there’s no interest in them coming back again and again. This is not the type of brand we want to build; is it?

The most effective brands tell the best stories that is, the most convincing, the most relevant, or the most entertaining stories about their offering.

We would argue that today, brands don’t just need to tell good stories; they also need to tell credible ones.

Credible stories create good stories, and good stories shape perceptions and ultimately buyer behaviour.

Credibility rules the day and is valuable, so let’s do credible!!!

Let’s keep the conversation going on the MoB Capital  (Pvt) Ltd Facebook Page and twitter.

Sintibale Zulu is a brand maverick and director at BrandSmith, a boutique Brand and Digital Marketing Consultancy and Morris Mpala is Managing Director of MoB Capital (Pvt) Limited, a microfinance institution offering loans, micro-insurance and advisory services to small to medium enterprises as well as individuals.