Suddenly, those things that happen in the background – the things B2B technology brands do to power and secure the world economy – become front of mind for the media and the wider public.

And just like that, your brand can be famous – not for what you’ve done, but for what you’ve not done.

So, why does this reputational damage matter beyond the obvious problem it creates with your ‘buyer’ audiences?

Because such damage can last decades.

In three years’ time, you may be having a conversation at the office with a colleague when you get on to the topic of holidays, and how you were thinking of going to Greece.

Immediately, you trigger them – “I was REALLY looking forward to going to Greece three years ago, but it was that day the internet crashed and I ended up spending 12 hours at the airport, then going home. That was my <INSERT YOUR BRAND NAME HERE> holiday.”

Crisis management tends to be a PR job, something that clicks into gear on Day One of your crisis. But could your brand be better prepared in advance for something like this?

In B2B, we’ve got very good at segmenting audiences and creating small pools of people – ‘intent’ audiences, ‘strategic accounts’, ‘CxO’ audiences, and ‘technical buyer’ audiences.

When we run brand programs, we have priority audiences, but we also group a lot of these segments together. We might target them differently and we might slightly alter the message, but that is our audience. And budgets aren’t infinite – so being tight on audiences makes sense.

BUT.

When events like today occur, we learn the importance of the services that tech brands sell. Unfortunately, we also learn what happens when that tech goes wrong.

Many tech brands can be unknown, or at best not understood, by a wider public audience until they become infamous.

So, shouldn’t reputation management start a lot earlier? Yes, buying audiences are relatively small (even if decision making units are increasing every year). But the size of the audience influencing your brand’s reputation (and therefore influencing your potential buyers too) is vast.  Investing in brand is a long-term play, and it’s also as much about the people your tech helps as the people it’s purchased by.

It’s time B2B tech brands thought more deeply about this. Their technology enables the world, and that’s just about the most positive story anybody can market.

When something does go wrong, your brand starts from a better place if there is familiarity with that message.