Brands today represent a set of ideas and beliefs. They aim to create a positive image in the minds of their customers and employees. For example, a brand that strives for community transformation will try to make its employees and customers believe in the cause. By doing so, it forms a perception of how it is transforming their lives. Brands achieve their goals through careful planning, strategic decision-making, and modernist principles. The ultimate goal of a brand is to reach its full potential and avoid extinction. When brands succeed, consumers accept them as an integral part of their lives, which leads to natural advocacy, trust, and credibility.
In addition, a brand’s reputation is like a shadow that never leaves. A campaign surrounding positivity and impact somehow remerges time and time again, even if the time stamps are significantly distant. It emerges as the light of dawn and pushes its customers to recall the brand’s purpose, sensitivity, direction and composure. A brand’s reputation exists as a collection of its responses, activities and customer experiences. All of it combines to form an everlasting narrative centred on remaining within the customer’s mind.
Sometimes, brands make big mistakes that cause them to lose their positive image. No brand wants to decline from the perception they have built over the years. This could be due to unexpected negative reactions, miscommunication, or even an unhappy experience from a top customer. Such situations create inconvenience and pressure within the organisation, ultimately resulting in losing customers. When this happens, customers lose their trust in the brand and no longer have the same positive perception they once had.
External Happenings can occur due to several reasons. Yet some common scenarios that emerge from the blues tend to be:

Functional Dysfunction
The key function of a product or service may have failed to serve due to any malfunction of the specific product or service sent to the customer.

Uncontrolled Variable
Especially in the digital era, a brand may suffer from losing consumer confidence due to the interdependency of several stakeholders, be they internal or external. A food delivery service or even an e-commerce service would surely suffer from any issue caused by the end of delivery or processing. At such times, it is hard for consumers to believe that the brand has indeed spent efforts in training and socialising each worker in its value chain.

Radicalism
Political and Social correctness happens to be one of the most crucial aspects of communication in the current world. As such, in the event of contradicting ideologies to a point where it becomes derogatory, consumers are indeed sure to lose confidence and cancel brands.
As such, it is essential to understand how to navigate through such crises when consumer confidence is on the decline, and external happenings threaten the brand.

A Sincere Apology followed by an Explanation
In the event of any mishap which may set off consumer confidence, there remains the need for a sincere apology. Consumers expect a brand to care about their feelings and sentiments.
Consumers deserve an explanation – be it for the sake of what went wrong or in order to learn the other side of the story. A brand can apologise and share its own side of the story with relevant explanations of how something went wrong. After all, consumers are sentient beings and rational creatures. Doing so, even if not all consumers are convinced, there would be a significant chunk of the audience who would realise how the brand meant no harm and acknowledge its mistake. Consequently, further activity can lead to a better comeback. This would further increase consumer satisfaction.

Don’t Cover the Wound
Cover-ups are not invisible smokescreens anymore and often end up getting the matter messier. Instead of leading consumers into believing that the brand has changed, it is important to justify the brand’s narrative and share relevant insights in the form of communication. Instead of defending oneself, a brand can bring in first-hand testimonials or reviews from consumers themselves who believe in the brand and are ready to protect it. If the brand is misunderstood, the consumers would surely understand the implication that had been caused, provided that the mishap was not a truly offensive occurrence.

Apologetic Incentive
Especially in the case of digital business models which operate under a cloud framework, even though it is not unknown – providing additional offerings and incentives increases consumer confidence and satisfaction. It may be in the form of consumer promotions or personalised incentives.
However, the incentive should not be such that the consumers end up exploiting the ordeal with regular complaints and manipulative claims.

Open-Ended feedback
The beauty of digitised presence is how acting as a touchpoint for millions of voices has become easy. An occurrence that leads to consumer dissatisfaction and lowered confidence requires the consumers themselves to guide towards an agreeable conclusion. A brand can use open-ended polls, questionnaires, and satisfaction metrics in order to decipher the loopholes; thoughts embedded within the consumer’s mind.
Consumer confidence is an intangible fragment of rationality that takes into account emotional intelligence and psychological integration of influence. It leads the way to turning a product into a brand and attaches meaning to the cause of its existence. Brand marketers work relentlessly to create an identity and it is quite natural to end up making unintended mistakes. It is more important to get over the mistake and build accordingly. After all, a brand is a living, breathing plane of existence and that is what the consumers relate to – a personified, modulated offering.

Author- Mohaimenul Solaiman Nicholas