Reputations, like football teams in Euro 2016, can suffer immense set backs from own goals. Avoiding those own goals or mitigating their impact is a crucial job of corporate communications teams and agencies.
As Roy Hodgson, Joachim Löw, Didier Deschamps or any other national team managers will know, the way that an on-pitch performance is judged by fans and commentators will often be set well before the kick-off whistle is blown.
The same is very true of reputation management. It is the long, systematic, crafting of a positive corporate reputation that allows companies who encounter crises to handle them with resilience. However well a crisis is handled in the heat of the moment, it is the level of residual goodwill in the bank with all its stakeholders that will ultimately decide whether it will be given a red or yellow card.
As a case in point, the self-inflicted woes of The Co-op could well have sunk them, but a strong reputation and positioning that had been nurtured since 1844 meant that they have been able to weather the storm to a greater extent. It’s a clear statement that Co-op’s new logo is actually their old 1968 logo, which represented the brand in its consumer heyday.
At Lexis we look at the crafting of reputation as both art and science. The science is to use a wide range of measurement tools and processes (not just media coverage) to help companies understand how well, or poorly, they are viewed. Third-parties such as The Reputation Institute provide useful benchmarking against seven key drivers of reputation. The art is to know what to do about the findings: this comes from our years of experience in working with globally-renowned brands on reputation campaigns.
And how to avoid those own goals? Companies should regularly assess every point of reputational vulnerability and make changes to avoid them. Even better, get an outsider to do it. Someone with no vested interest. It could just save your business.
Dominic Shales is managing director at LEXIS
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