KNOWLEDGE BASE
Reputation Marketing
Most businesses think about reviews only when a bad one lands. That reflex has a name — reputation management — and it is a defensive posture. Reputation marketing is the opposite discipline: treating what customers already say about you as an asset to be used, not a risk to be contained.
Where Reputation Is Made and Measured
Six entities that shape how a business is judged before anyone has spoken to it.
REVIEWS
Customer Reviews
What customers write, and what platforms do with it.
3 GUIDES
PSYCHOLOGY
Social Proof
Why people follow the crowd.
3 GUIDES
REFERRALS
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Recommendations people pass on.
3 GUIDES 04 ACCREDITATIONBetter Business Bureau
Grades, complaints and accreditation.
3 GUIDES
PLATFORM
Trustpilot
An open door for reviews.
2 GUIDES
REFERENCE
ConsumerAffairs
Complaints as a public record.
REFERENCEWhat Is Reputation Marketing?
Reputation marketing sits at the join of two older fields — reputation management and brand marketing. It grew out of a specific shift: reputation used to be vetted through word of mouth, slowly and privately. Now it is vetted publicly, in real time, by strangers leaving reviews. Reputation marketing is the practice of treating that public record as something you actively work with, rather than something you brace against.
The distinction from reputation management.
Reputation management is largely about handling the negative — responding to a bad review, suppressing a damaging result. Reputation marketing also handles the positive: surfacing it, amplifying it, and using it to bring in customers who haven't arrived yet. One protects. The other converts.
It runs on social proof.
The underlying mechanism is well-studied and predates the internet by decades — the tendency to look at what others did before deciding. Sherif demonstrated it experimentally; Cialdini later named it as one of the core principles of persuasion. A review page is that principle rendered as a product feature.
Which is why the platforms matter.
Reviews are not evenly weighted, because the places holding them aren't equivalent. A rating on a general review platform, an accreditation from a long-established bureau, and a complaint filed on a consumer site all carry different weight with a reader and with a search engine. Knowing which surfaces count is most of the work. Getting that weighting right is part of local search visibility, not separate from it.
Wikipedia: Reputation marketing
The reference article on reputation marketing — its emergence from reputation management and brand marketing, and the review platforms that drive it.
Read the full article →Reputation marketing and reputation management are routinely used as synonyms. They aren't. One is what you do after the bad review. The other is what you should have been doing before it.
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