Is reputation becoming a meaningless buzzword?
What reputation actually is, and why your CEO should care.
Written by Shanna Crispin
Walk into almost any communications strategy meeting and you'll hear someone mention reputation.
Building it, protecting it, enhancing it.
But ask ten people what reputation actually is, and you'll probably get ten different answers.
I remember, many moons ago, working as a business journalist, everyone was talking about productivity.
If I had to guess, I would estimate that “productivity” came up in at least half of the conversations I had with business leaders.
But there wasn’t a lot of detail about what that actually meant. Efficiency was often shared as an explanation, without bringing any further clarity.
Are communicators guilty of the same when it comes to reputation – has reputation become a buzzword that is bandied about without much meaning?
And is that part of the reason why, when I ask colleagues whether reputation is a focus for their CEOs, the answer is often “not really”?
How does reputation show up?
Reputation is the bridge between experience and expectation. It reflects what people believe about your organisation today and what they expect you will do tomorrow.
A good reputation will look different depending on the sector or organisational goals. A consumer product business, for example, may look for positive reviews from existing customers and strong search appearances as would-be customers research products as indicators of reputation.
For public sector companies, these are indicators of reputation:
Employee retention
Social sentiment
Customer feedback
Community trust
While these are outcomes influenced by reputation:
Ability to recruit
Tender participation
Compliance with regulation
Public attention during emergencies
Reputation can determine whether CEO KPIs are achieved
Returning to the question of whether CEOs are thinking about reputation.
CEOs are rarely measured on "reputation" itself, but they are measured on the things that reputation influences.
All of these are influenced by reputation:
Customer satisfaction – the most obvious link where satisfaction is tied to longer-term perception
Service or project delivery – increasing scrutiny from the public or failure to attract staff or contractors all impact delivery timelines
Financial performance – if an organisation is plagued by negative controversy due to poor reputation that takes time to address. And time is money.
For us communicators, the real challenge is making the tangible link between operational and strategic objectives and reputation. That involves quantifying what reputation actually is and how it impacts the organisational goals.
Reputation only becomes a buzzword when we fail to measure it.