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Key takeaways:
"Reputation can be more influential than product quality and most brands aren’t ready for that." - Adrian Leshan
Africa, often described as the cradle of mankind, is itself a brand: rich with stories, values, and meaning. Our oral history has long passed on memories of traditional knowledge on culture, society, and commerce.
In 2025, as a connected society and the world’s youngest continent, we have a 100 year future to shape through resilient organisations, ones that consciously shape how they are perceived by stakeholders.
Brand reputation encompasses the collective perception, sentiment, and evaluation that customers, stakeholders, and the broader public hold toward an organisation. It represents the culmination of every interaction, experience, and impression associated with the brand. This intangible yet powerful asset determines how recognizable, trustworthy, and valuable a brand appears in the marketplace.
Across Africa we see it in some of its fastest-growing sectors with telecoms, banking, financial services, agriculture, gaming, and the services sector. Even among publicly traded companies in the Nigerian Stock Exchange, Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and Nairobi Stock Exchange. Maintaining a healthy and resilient reputation is essential for business growth and delivering shareholder value.
A strong reputation serves as both shield and magnet, protecting during challenges while attracting loyal customers and partnerships. Conversely, a damaged reputation can undermine years of brand-building efforts. This delicate ecosystem of public opinion ultimately shapes consumer behaviour, market positioning, and long-term viability, making reputation management a critical strategic priority for any organisation seeking sustainable success.
With that in mind, it comes as no surprise that the majority of people choose what to buy based on a brand’s reputation. Surprised? Don’t be! A study conducted by Trustpilot showed that brand reputation is the top factor shoppers consider when choosing a product or service, even more important than the quality of the product or service. In South Africa, HelloPeter.com is a popular platform for tracking consumer complaints across various sectors. Similarly, in Kenya, social media reviews on platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok serve a comparable purpose. In today's digital age, consumers readily share their experiences with a brand's products or services, and it's clear that negative reviews or comments can severely damage a brand's reputation, ultimately leading to lost revenue.
Before taking on any initiative to enhance your brand reputation, it is crucial to first assess your current position through careful analysis of stakeholder perceptions across all touchpoints. By evaluating public sentiment and identifying perception gaps, you establish the necessary foundation for effective reputation management. This evidence-based understanding is what will enable you to create strategies that align with both market expectations and organisational values.
With over a decade of experience, Nendo has pioneered social media listening across East Africa; from challenger brands to philanthropic giants.
We often use Brandwatch Consumer Research – an AI-powered consumer intelligence platform that allows you to monitor brand mentions, analyse social conversations, and extract actionable insights across the digital landscape. Brandwatch boasts the world’s largest library of over 1.4 trillion social media posts, for historical analysis.
Its comprehensive suite enables organisations to track sentiment trends, identify emerging issues, and understand consumer behaviour at scale, helping brands make data-driven decisions about their reputation management strategies. This is just one example of the multiple tools that are out there in the market; it really is a factor of you taking your pick, based on your organisation’s need. Here at Nendo, Brandwatch is our bread and butter, hence the reference.
The platform offers a very handy feature called Reactscore which offers a numerical assessment of your brand’s risk levels based on online mentions surrounding your brand. The risk can either be: low, medium or high.
Below is an assessment of the top 5 banks in Kenya over 2024:
Most brands monitor their branded mentions well but often ignore unbranded mentions — missing a significant piece of the reputation puzzle.
"Most valuable data lives in unbranded mentions but few brands are listening." - Adrian Leshan
Our experience shows that the bulk of valuable data lives in unbranded mentions.
Keywords are the terms people use to search for information online.
Nendo coined the term "branded keywords" to refer to queries including your company's name or specific products. This is where most companises stop, and it's a costly mistake. Missing additional search terms in a boolean query (a string of text used to search using a social media listening software) can spell poor data, inaccurate conclusions, and misleading metrics.
The most important additions to make are “unbranded” keywords. While unbranded keywords are general terms related to your industry, by monitoring these keywords, you can uncover valuable insights into your brand's standing. Research shows that 78% of consumers research a brand online before making a purchase decision, making keyword-driven reputation critical to business success.
Take Safaricom, Kenya’s leading TelCo turned TechCo. Think of their brands, if creating a distinction between “branded” and “unbranded” mentions we may consider the following:
Branded Keywords:
When analysing Safaricom, Kenya’s leading TelCo turned TechCo, Nendo’s boolean queries often include over 100 terms, sometimes over 1,000, carefully annotated to ensure they deliver the right insights.
Missing the right keywords can cost millions in lost engagement, misinterpreted data, and failed opportunities to respond.
“Unbranded Keywords”
Branded Keywords: A Mirror to Direct Perception
Imagine your brand’s name as a front-door bell that never stops ringing. Every time someone types a branded phrase; “Safaricom points,” “Baze offers,” “Safaricom outage,” “M-PESA not working”, the bell chimes:
For any company, branded keywords are the clearest reflection of how existing or would-be customers feel that very minute. They spotlight the sparks of excitement to fuel and the sparks of anger to extinguish, often before social feeds erupt.
Now step off the porch and listen to the street-corner conversation. Your brand isn’t being tagged directly, but the talk is still about you. Unbranded phrases; “cheapest data bundles,” “fastest internet Kenya,” the nicknames Safcon or SCOM, even career queries like “Safaricom internship” are weather fronts: they tell you which way public opinion is drifting.
Because no one’s tagging your official handle, these whispers won’t surface on your notifications tab. Tracking them tells you not only what the public thinks today but what they might decide tomorrow.
With that being said, it becomes clear that your brand reputation is critical to your overall business success, and a good and strong reputation:
Step 1: Examine your current reputation
To start building your brand reputation management strategy, you should know your current reputation. Treat this first step as a reference point to benchmark if your actions support a positive brand image or quite the opposite.How to do it in practice?As stated before, you can use one of many online tools that streamline this initial phase. (e.g. Brandwatch)
This process involves analyzing text data to detect the emotions behind each mention. Usually, the tools equipped with sentiment analysis feature identify three types of sentiment: positive, negative, and neutral. In practice, detailed sentiment analysis is a road sign guiding where you should focus your attention and resources, for example, by responding to negative reviews, comments, and opinions. As you know, people express their thoughts and opinions everywhere, social media platforms and sites to leave online reviews. Sentiment analysis allows you to recognise which sources enhance your positive brand reputation, or, quite the opposite, identify the favorite space of your critics and haters.
Whereas sentiment analysis detects the positive or negative brand reputation, emotion analysis goes even further. It shows the precise feelings your target audience has towards your brand. This equips you with more detailed knowledge on where to pivot your efforts to build brand reputation.
As you surely know, not every voice on the Internet is equal. People with more reach and an engaged audience have more influence. Well, that’s why they’re called influencers. Therefore, your brand reputation involves identifying your key positive and negative influencers. All this, as mentioned earlier, can be done through social listening tools like Brandwatch. Influencer analysis can easily help you discover the most influential authors who speak about your brand.
After understanding your current brand reputation, you can take a second step – build a more positive brand image!
The following tips are universal. Even if you’re happy with your present situation, ensure that you apply them:
Brand reputation exists in a state of perpetual flux rather than as a fixed asset.After conducting a thorough brand reputation assessment and implementing strategic enhancement initiatives, continuous monitoring becomes essential as the critical third phase.Effective evaluation requires established benchmarks, comparing current performance metrics against historical data provides the clearest indication of whether your reputation management strategies are yielding positive results. This longitudinal analysis reveals meaningful trends and validates the effectiveness of your reputation-building efforts over time.
There is no better measure of your reputation management strategy's effectiveness than tracking your brand's performance trajectory over time. Historical comparison provides the clearest evidence of whether your reputation-building initiatives are genuinely strengthening your market position.
Last but not least, reputation development demands ongoing commitment and vigilance!
Remember that in today's dynamic marketplace, stagnation equates to regression. Just look at brands that once dominated but failed to maintain digital engagement. Their decline didn’t begin with a bad product. It began with silence.
"Decline doesn’t begin with a bad product, it begins with silence." - Adrian Leshan.
Uchumi, once a leading supermarket chain in Kenya, lost public trust and relevance as complaints about empty shelves, poor service, and financial instability went unanswered. With limited digital presence and no active listening to customer feedback online, the narrative took on a life of its own, one Uchumi failed to control or counter in time.
To establish and maintain a formidable brand reputation, you must consistently execute (and systematically reassess) the following strategic initiatives:
Conclusion
Proactive brand reputation management is essential for sustainable success. By strategically influencing perceptions through every touchpoint, from customer interactions to public communications, you build the trust that drives loyalty. Consistent monitoring and responsive management of your brand's image creates a positive reputation that strengthens customer relationships and accelerates business growth.
Click here to see how Nendo can conduct a digital AUDIT or help you with insights and missing comments, complaints and compliments from your customers or competitors using social media listening. Book a free 15-minute discovery session with one of our analysts, or email hello@nendo.co.ke, cc mark@nendo.co.ke and ruth@nendo.co.ke to share your brief.
