Brand vs Reputation Whats the Difference?

The company that I would like to discuss is Google. This company has one of the strongest brand names due to the magnitude of products that they are beginning to put into the marketplace and obviously the famed search engine “Google”, which I would say is one of the most used “product” in the US.

In addition, Google has always branded itself as the company that will push technology into the future, in terms of the new phones that they are producing and also their initiative in the electronic car marketplace. These are only a few of the numerous things that Google is doing and I feel that they are beginning to expand more and more into other sectors than just the web.

This is also the case in the people they hire because their brand pushes for the best of the best because they have branded themselves as the company of the Future, and in my opinion “more techy” than even Apple. This all helps Google to become one of the major players in the technology industry and helps expand their reputation all over the world because of the respect that their competitors hold about Google.

I feel that this brand and reputation tie together very well because they have tried to build the brand of being the Company of the Future and the reputation that they have is based on this idea of being the “Future”. I think that what a company Brands itself should be based on the reputation that others have about it because if Google said it was the company of the Future but customers/investors didn’t think so then that Brand should be changed because obviously people don’t hold the same view as the company. These two aspects are so correlated because the brand is what the company thinks of itself based on how the reputation of their company is view by outsiders. So this whole idea that Google brands itself as the company of the Future tells me that they want to hire employees who will help build this brand and they want their customers reputation of themselves to be seen as the brightest and best technology company out there.

So overall I would definitely say that Google has made a name for itself as being the company of the Future and have used this brand to build products to build that reputation. Without the reputation a company cant brand itself to be something completely different than how they are viewed.

Reputation at work

As with most people who did sports everyone had a role on their team. Well mine was always to be the fun, goofy kid because I always enjoy jokes. This sounds pretty juvenile but I feel that every group needs different people who has different roles, such as: the super intense kids who are only about performance and “Live, Breath, and Love” the sport, then there are usually the kids in the middle who like to have some fun during practice because it helps to make everything more enjoyable (slightly). I was always a pretty goofy kid, who would try and make others laugh because at least to me being a teammate is someone who tries to make others more comfortable and what better way than some savvy one-liners during that 6-8am practice.

However, as I grew older I realized that I needed to start to relax with the jokes because is sometimes distracted me from the overall goal which was to go as fast as possible and not be able to talk after sets. This change was pretty apparent from 8^th grade to High school because of how much harder the competition became and now we were fighting for spots on the Varsity team and potentially college recruitment. While this change was difficult for me at first, I learned that after practice is a more suitable place for jokes and it helps to unwind after a morning swim practice. In addition, this allowed me to be much more productive in practice and helped me to be one of the top freshmen swimmers on a team that was a many time state champion.

While this change was difficult at first I really felt it was beneficial to my development as a swimmer and as more serious athlete/individual. Overall this change really helped me to see that if one gets their work done then why wouldn’t a person try and have fun with my teammates, and that only makes me enjoy waking up for those dreadful AM practices.

the triangle of death

For my summer internship I have dealt with a situation where I was in a triangle relationship between the principal agent problems. This was during the beginning part of the internship where I was required to talk to individuals about their experiences with financial planning and also try to get them to use our company for financial advising.

This situation was very difficult because it required me to not only be very engaged with the customers but also my boss because if I didn’t make any calls or contact any individuals I wouldn’t be doing a very good job for my boss. This is the same for my other agent relationship, which was my customers and I. This relationship required me to be very specific when discussing options that one could take for financial planning and also asking them what they would like to do.

This circumstance really proves to me that this was a triangle relationship because if there wasn’t adequate communication between me and my boss and me and the customers the relationship would’ve broken down and the efficiency of communication would dramatically decrease. This left me in a lot of difficult calls because sometimes a customer wouldn’t answer for a few days, which would require me to have my boss wait till I made contact with that individual. In addition, if there were difficulties with communication then I would need to deal with both parties having different thinking about how to advise what the customers decide.

However, since both parties were so involved there weren’t any situations where only one principal got their way because I worked in a service company so there wasn’t a lot of only one way transactions because especially in financial advising its hard to have the company have all say over what the customer should do any how their money should be divided up into many stocks, etc.

Obviously there can be some tension between the two principals because they are dealing with managing money, which can be a very difficult situation because obviously there are many different methods of managing money and also a lot of opportunity for fighting/arguments. I haven’t dealt with many fights but I have had some pretty extreme phone calls with people; allowing me to really see the triangle relationships between me being the agent and the two principals being the customers and the company. I also can see that there will probably be conflicts in the future and it just means that I will need to be able to make sure that the communication is effective.