The Attitudes Behind a Trusted Brand

by Loren Paulsson on October 20, 2011

Trusted Brands Toyota’s recent quality issues illustrate how quickly a brand can go from object of emulation to punch line. But according to Millward Brown’s “2011 BrandZ Top 100,” Toyota’s brand was still 11 percent more valuable than it was the previous year.

Perhaps Toyota has weathered the storm better because Toyota products’ past dependability had built up a certain amount of goodwill. Barbara Rozgonyi of Wired PR Works reported Millward Brown ranked Toyota the seventh “most trusted and recommended” brand in the United States.

Amazon.com ranked number one in the United States in trust and gained 37 percent in brand value worldwide. All together five of the top 10 most trusted brands in the United States—Amazon.com, FedEx, Toyota, Pampers, and United Parcel Service—also ranked among the top 100 most valuable brands in the world.

Anyone who consults Consumer Reports before buying a car or a lawn mower has some idea of how dependability can affect brand reputation. But building that kind of dependability into an organization takes time…and some seemingly counterintuitive effort.

When a leader avoids promising more than he or she can deliver and gets things done on time, it reinforces the value of agreements, shows respect for team members who are affected, and sets a standard for future leaders. Different cultures and situations require different levels of precision, but a leader must always keep his or her word. That means living up to safety standards he or she expects of others, abiding by company policy, and showing up at the agreed upon time.

A leader also needs to communicate, sometimes more than comes naturally. In the short term, it seems easier to give out as little information as possible and explain decisions after they have been made. But if leaders truthfully communicate the challenges facing the organization, colleagues will be more able to understand, even if they don’t agree.

Colleagues probably won’t believe a leader’s sincerity in the beginning, but if a leader can graciously engage with criticism when it comes and respond decisively to whatever legitimate issues the critic raises, he or she will have more credibility to challenge others to achieve goals they might not yet know they can reach.

Yet even beyond these considerations, when a leader works through the process of making things right, he or she helps others get beyond getting caught or pointing fingers and focus instead on getting things as close as possible to the way they ought to be. Problems don’t get bigger when someone points them out. Problems get bigger when someone lets them slide.

We notice a lack of dependability when a car breaks down or someone misses a deadline. But dependability isn’t just meeting deadlines; it’s all those little daily decisions that put us and our colleagues in position to seize tomorrow’s opportunities.