Unlike large organisations, with multiple big budgets, startups often don’t have money to work with large marketing agencies. Understanding communications is important because it can help you find ways of cost-effectively communicating about your brand.

A brand is what you want it to be, essentially. A brand is what you put out. It differs from reputation, which is how my brand is perceived and received, versus what I put out. A brand is what I can control. It makes me relevant and makes me topical.

The Reputation Institute has a model called the RepTrak model, which essentially measures reputation based on four themes, seven dimensions and 23 attributes. The four themes are admire, esteem, feeling and trust.

First and foremost, you’ve got to define who you are and what you stand for. Once you’ve done that, and you’ve defined your niche, or the positioning that you want to go to market with, focus on the areas that you can control. 

The single biggest thing that can damage a brand’s reputation is unresolved issues, because unresolved issues can become crises down the line. 

Consumers are more forgiving when you just say sorry. To use an old example, KFC had that chicken washing incident in about 2015, the way KFC tackled it at first was shitty and essentially more damaging for them. But then they put a massive advert in all the papers, saying that they’d messed up and were sorry.

You first have to mobilise your team. Step two is to decide and agree on the key messages to communicate and the people we are communicating with. The next step is to send out the messages across the agreed platforms and to the desired stakeholders. Finally, we regroup as a team and analyse the effectiveness of our messages.

If a company has a disgruntled employee who publicly speaks negatively about the company, one option is to take it off-line as quickly as possible. The other option is to consult a journalist. 

The first hack is to focus on customer experience. The second is to ask for reviews and feedback on your product or service, and then listen to that feedback. Lastly, consider a small niche PR team that specialises and has experience in your industry, to help you grow your share of voice. 

There is no one-size-fits-all template, unfortunately. Regardless of the size of the business, you need to do an in-depth exercise to get to a strategy. As a small business, you need a big focus on a few things. Instead of trying to be a big fish in a small pond, choose a few things and do them really, really well.