Open Road

Friday Sep 18th 2009

Build a reputation that will last

Article appears in PR Week 18th September.

Graham McMillan

Are we big enough to admit that too often what we do in our industry is deal with the symptoms of corporate reputation rather than focusing on the real drivers behind it?

Let’s be honest – press conferences, releases, media briefings, contact programmes, product launches, monitoring and evaluation are all very important, but they are not on their own what really makes and breaks corporate reputations.

What market and opinion research studies over time consistently how is that the main factors driving corporate reputation are not how great your PR is, or how charismatic your CEO, how sexy your advertising or how much money you give to charity.  (Charitable donations usually come last on the list of what influences views on corporate reputation and it is worth remembering that Enron and Northern Rock gave lots of money to charity.)

Instead, studies show that the most fundamental drivers are the quality of your products and service and the way you treat your employees and other stakeholders.

This of course makes absolute sense.  Corporate reputation is the aggregate of people’s views derived from all of their interactions with you whether that is through buying your product or service or hearing about you from others who work there or who have direct dealings with you.  What you pick up from the media (online or offline) is not as powerful as your first hand experience or those of people you know and trust.

To this we should add corporate and financial integrity, honesty and trustworthiness.  It is fairly self-evident that companies that are lacking in these areas can fall from grace in spectacular fashion.

Do we as communicators spend enough time and resource on working with our colleagues on quality of product, strong relationships with employees, engaging with stakeholders, treating stakeholders fairly and ensuring corporate honesty and integrity?  Are we even equipped to do, or to help others do this properly?

Delivering these things effectively and having a major impact over the long term on corporate reputation depends on defining, distilling and delivering on your company or organisation’s core values and living up to them even when the going gets tough.

Critics might say that it is all very well talking about values, trustworthiness and behaviours, but does that really feed through into long term corporate reputation and will it benefit the bottom line?

Well, yes it will.

The evidence from a range of studies shows that over the long term companies with a strong association with values and strong relationships of trust with all of their stakeholders maintain their success for far longer and by a range of measures are more successful financially than those that are not.

Nor is it the case that values and ethos are irrelevant in a recession.

In a recession, people want comfort.  They like traditional brands and these have done well in the recession.  In terms of corporate reputation, though, they want traditional values to come to the fore.  They actively want to be reassured that the corporate brands they engage with are following traditional values, are being honest and trustworthy, understand their needs in a difficult time but are also doing their bit to make a positive difference.

Much to the surprise of the Marks and Spencer Plan A team, for example, the M&S marketing team, rather than wanting to cut advertising about Plan A in the recession, wanted to continue it because M&S customers at a time of stress wanted reassurance that the company was living up to its values.  The response to Plan A communications has been better in a recession than it was before.

Consumers will not pay more for values in a recession.  But they want to know even more that they are still there.

It is time we focused more on making sure that corporate reputation is really built to last.