ReputationInstitute

Reputation Management Sessions

The Building Blocks of Reputation

Corporate reputations are intangible assets that, if managed correctly, can provide firms with economic value. Corporate reputations are assets because they influence the profitability of companies and are unique and inimitable. They are valuable because they influence consumers' decisions about the products and services they want to purchase, investors' decisions about which companies they will lend to or buy shares of, and job-seekers' decisions about which companies they want to work for. Unfortunately, they are also intangible—and so are difficult to measure.

The purpose of this session is to develop a shared understanding of the concept of 'reputation'. Participants are exposed to the underlying theoretical frameworks that can be used to deconstruct the meaning of the term, and how it relates to other constructs such as trust, respect, admiration, appeal, and attractiveness. Reputations are built through a process of social construction that involves a complex set of interactions between social units (such as people, groups, companies, or countries). The media and other intermediaries play a role in shaping how perceptions are formed, and how they evolve. We focus in particular on the concept of ‘corporate reputation' and examine the underlying drivers that influence how perceptions of companies are formed in the minds of stakeholders, and the pivotal role played by companies themselves and by their interactions with the media. We also examine the consequences of corporate reputations—the degree to which they influence the level of support that companies receive from stakeholders, and so affect their bottom line performance and results. Reputation management is therefore closely tied to the strategic management of an organization, and involves creating economic value for the company's multiple stakeholders.

Benefits: Through this session, participants will develop a grounded understanding of the key building blocks of reputations, whether for companies, institutions, or other social groupings. In addition to developing insight into the reputation management process, we also overview some of the major empirical traditions in reputation measurement—and introduce participants to the RepTrak™ scorecard and how it has been implemented by Reputation Institute.

Readings:
Charles Fombrun & Cees van Riel, Fame & Fortune
Cees Van Riel & Charles Fombrun, Essentials of Corporate Communication

Corporate Branding & Business Strategy

Companies are faced with numerous challenges: They need to find new sources of sustainable differentiation in a market of ever greater imitation; they are pressured to increase their capacity to change; to improve their ability to accommodate to different market and customer needs, and to respond to the multiple demands of both internal and external stakeholders wishing to know who the company is and what it stands for. This implies that the focus of branding has shifted away from individual products to the corporations that make them. Brand management has therefore become a company-wide process and the corporate brand has become one of the most important strategic assets in the corporate portfolio.

This session introduces participants to the concept of the 'corporate brand' and the importance for companies to focus on who "we" are as organizations. It points to the many differences between product brands and corporate brands and explains why companies are increasingly investing behind their corporate brands. During the session, we describe a diagnostic framework to assess the coherence and efficiency of a company's corporate brand. The framework derives from the concept of alignment between strategic vision, organizational culture, and stakeholders images. It points to the implications of mis-alignment, whether it is employees that do not fulfill the company's brand promise or consumers that do not find the strategic aspirations of the brand relevant for them.

The session will discuss the change processes involved in corporate brand execution, along with the active involvement of stakeholders in the branding process. The Session will take a closer look at how LEGO Group generated strategic renewal by a stronger alignment of their corporate brand and willingness to include their key stakeholders in the process.

Benefits: By the end of the session, participants should be able to:

1. Identify the key issues of corporate brand management;
2. Diagnose the coherence of their own companies or divisions when viewed as corporate brands;
3. Analyze how a corporate brand helps set the direction of a company's strategy;
4. Understand that corporate brand execution entails organizational change involving multiple stakeholders.

Readings:
Hatch, M. J. & Schultz, M. (2008) Taking Brand Initiative. How companies can align strategy, culture and identity through corporate branding. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Developing Reputation Platforms

This session links reputation management to corporate strategy by focusing on the dual concepts of 'stakeholder relations' and 'value chain coherence'. Consistent, coherent activities and communications are critical for the creation of reputational capital and sustainable competitive advantage. A "Reputation Platform" refers to the issues and goals that a company chooses to address across its value chain with its stakeholder groups. A reputation platform is the point of distinctiveness that differentiates a company from its competitors.

Stakeholders refer to groups or individuals who have a stake in a company's performance. These include primary stakeholders, such as employees, customers and investors, and secondary stakeholders such as the media, activists, communities and the government. Each has expectations of how well the company will perform as well as the resources on which the company depends, whether in the form of revenues, financial capital, or a license to operate. Companies tend to prioritize the stakeholders based on an analysis of who they are most dependent upon for critical resources.

Developing a strong reputation platform requires a company to develop consistent activities and communication across its key stakeholder groups. These coherent programs span the entire value chain from inbound logistics to human resources and sales & service. Three themes characterize the most popular reputation platforms. These themes tend to have five overall communication characteristics.

Strategic Alignment refers to the consistency of activities and messages across the organization. When aligned effectively, a company's reputation platform can help shape how stakeholders come to understand what a company stands for and what it promises to deliver. Steps in achieving alignment include a review of the company's corporate positioning and messages as well as the consistency of its activities across the value chain.

Benefits: By the end of this session, participants should have a clear understanding of the key elements that drive creation of an effective reputation platform, and the processes that go into producing strategic alignment between a company and its key stakeholders.

Leadership & Communication

All of us come to a problem, opportunity, or decision with a set of assumptions that are based on our backgrounds and experiences. For example, someone who has spent years in a finance function—concentrating on, say, managing cash flow, raising capital, and budgeting—will have a particular point of view that is different from someone like you, whose experience has been in corporate communication—focusing on media relations, employee communications, investor relations, etc. Two implications arise from this: (1) Each person will have only a "limited" view of the whole story, and may be driven to define a problem as a "finance" or "marketing" problem because this is what his/her experience tells them, and (2) Each person may be correct, but only partially.

The solution to this problem is to develop a general management perspective. The general management perspective seeks to integrate multiple functional perspectives to arrive at a complete understanding of a problem or opportunity. The value of the general management perspective is especially important when running a function (like media relations) or department (like corporate communication); for it is here that the interplay of different functional imperatives—with their often conflicting views—becomes most apparent. This session focuses on the challenge of effectively combining the requirements of each functional area with the overall needs of the company as a whole.

The purpose of this session is:

1. To introduce the concept of "general management" to communicators, and
2. To develop the analytic skills needed for effective problem and opportunity identification.

Benefits: Participants in this session will learn to build, enhance, and perfect the skills they will need to excel as general managers working in corporate communication. They will complete the session with an understanding of key areas of general management that they will need to know as communications professionals from analyzing a range of short cases that focus on various functional areas of management.

Aligning Employees Through Corporate Communication

Corporate reputations are built from the inside out. Aligning employees behind organizational objectives is therefore crucial if companies are to ensure that employees act as ambassadors of the company. All too often, however, companies fail to communicate clearly with employees and so fail to mobilize support for strategic plans developed to improve their competitiveness.

This module addresses the following issues:

• What is the role of employee communication in building corporate reputation?
• How should employee communication be linked to a company's Human Resource Management practices?
• How should companies inform and motivate people?
• When should companies be satisfied with their employee communications?
• How can corporate communication help to generate behavioral change and stakeholder support?

Benefits: Through this session, participants gain insight into the role of employee communications in creating internal strategic alignment. We identify specific types of communication needed to build employee support and provide participants with a detailed understanding of the process through which a company can mobilize its human assets to build a more competitive position in the marketplace.

Creating Value for Investors

Why is it important to maintain a good reputation with present and potential investors? How can companies successfully manage their relationships with their shareholders? To what extent are financial stakeholders different from customers, employees, suppliers, and other stakeholders?

This session addresses these questions using both conceptual and case materials. A wide range of examples are used to illustrate and introduce the principles of reputation management with investors. We also provide a broad overview of the key academic research to provide participants with the kernels of knowledge that practitioners need to know in order to create value for investors who are increasingly global, knowledgeable, and demanding.

A good track record is no longer enough to earn companies the support of investors. Investors assess companies as investments based on a variety of governance factors that include having respected and committed leadership, having detailed and transparent communication about its corporate plans, and having credible and independent control systems. Managing investor relations therefore increasingly requires improved competencies and skills in building effective systems of governance.

Benefits: By the end of this session, participants should have:

• a clearer understanding of the key tenets of reputation management with investors;
• exposure to a range of reputation analysis tools;
• awareness of the diverse expectations companies have to deal with from the financial community, and how to address them.

Addressing Strategic Issues—Governance & Risk

In the wake of corporate collapses and lapses in leadership, it's become clear that there is a strong link between reputation, governance and risk. Risk needs to be given a higher profile at board level and directors and top management need to be aware that it is their responsibility to be alert to new and emerging risks, particularly reputational risk. Good governance should facilitate efficient, effective and entrepreneurial management that can deliver shareholder value over the longer term within appropriate risk parameters that are established, understood and engaged in by the board.

The purpose of this session is to:

• introduce key concepts of governance and risk and set out how they relate to reputation and strategy
• raise awareness of how human factors affect our perception of risk and influence the quality of decision-making including potential for groupthink and biases in decision-making
• consider the impact of 9/11, Enron and recent risk mismanagement on risk appetite, attitude and aptitude
• help understand how risk management and governance is changing
• highlight the increasing importance and global dimensions of social and ethical risks
• introduce the concept of reputational risk and outline best practice approaches
• explain the special role of non Executive Directors (NEDs) in managing reputational risk
• explain how companies can identify, prioritize and manage reputational risk exposure
• introduce ISO31000 (draft) and BS3100 (final) and their relationship to governance, risk and reputation

Benefits: This session should provide participants with an enhanced understanding of the latest thinking about the relationship between governance and risk, and a deepened understanding of best practices in reputational risk management. In the process, participants will be encouraged to embrace a more cross-functional, holistic approach and to adopt a proactive and participatory approach to governance and risk management.

Relating to the Media

The news media are one of the primary ways the public learns about companies. Whether through general interest news or through specialized news about financial performance, the media provide another voice and viewpoint that the general public rely on when forming their own opinions about a company. Relationships with the media are therefore a crucial building block for understanding corporate reputations.

Relationships with the media become particularly complicated when reputations are at stake. When it comes to corporate reputations, companies, their stakeholders, the general public, the media, and the courts all have differing opinions about what constitutes corporate defamation. These issues are especially complex for global companies because countries have different legal systems with varying degrees of protection afforded to the media.

Benefits: This session on media relations provides participants with a better understanding of:

• Who the news media are, including how and why they operate the way they do;
• How the news media influences corporate reputations;
• The factors that influence the production of business news;
• How monitoring media coverage can be used to build more effective programs of corporate communication.

Measuring, Tracking and Evaluating Corporate Reputations

Reputations are economic assets built on the perceptions of stakeholders. Reputation measurement therefore requires a careful understanding of how individual perceptions are created and develop, and how they influence the supportive behaviors of relevant stakeholders. At Reputation Institute (RI), we have been measuring reputations rigorously since 1999. Our approach is based on:

1. A carefully developed model of reputation based on seven dimensions which has been tested internationally,
2. A rigorous process of sampling that ensures representativeness of the results, and
3. A careful process of analysis that standardizes results and enables international and cross-industry comparisons.

In this Session, we'll discuss the steps necessary to develop a rigorous scorecard for accurately measuring reputations. To this end, the key questions to be answered are:

1. What are the key components of reputation?
2. How are reputation attributes identified & developed?
3. How are reputation scales and scores developed?
4. What analytical techniques can be used to model reputation data?
5. What are the drivers of reputation and supportive behavior?

Examples discussed in this section will draw on research conducted by Reputation Institute in over 23 countries, relying on the standardized RepTrak™ model that consists of 23 attributes grouped around 7 key dimensions. The discussion will provide rich content and a basic understanding of market research & statistics that will help improve every participant's understanding of cutting-edge reputation measurement.

Managing Social Issues

Over the last 30 years, there has been a sea change in the public's expectations of what constitutes an acceptable level of corporate business and social conduct. In large part, this has been the inevitable outcome of the globalization of economic activity, the growth of large multinational corporations, and, the disconnect between corporations and local communities at the national and international level. There is growing public distrust of large multinational companies, and skepticism that these companies actually conduct their operations in a manner that will yield both private profits and public good. This distrust or disenchantment is exacerbated by a perception that governments and regulatory bodies are unwilling or unable to hold companies accountable for the negative externalities arising from their core business operations. The result has been a major paradigm shift from public's desire for corporate social responsibility to a public demand for corporate social accountability.

Benefits: This session will provide participants with an analytical framework for social issues management that is designed to address the severity of social issues and their potential impact on corporations. It will enhance participants' understanding of the kinds of social issues companies must face, and the actions required of them by increasingly demanding publics.

Managing Crisis Situations

While all crises are unique, they share the following traits:

• "the element of surprise"
• "insufficient information"
• "quick pace of events"
• "intense scrutiny"

This session focuses on the following topics: What constitutes a "crisis" and what strategies exist for dealing with them? We begin by exploring characteristics of effective crisis management efforts that include placing a high value on issues management, distinguishing "planning" from "the plan", and following best response practices, including assessment and evaluation throughout. We also explore how to create a "Crisis Response Framework", and how to monitor corporate responses. Finally, we will identify key steps needed to ensure a strategic response to a crisis, namely:

• Defining the situation
• Setting the objectives
• Developing messages
• Organizing the response process
• Delivering a response

Benefits: From this session, participants can expect to have a better understanding of the different types of corporate crises, how they evolve, and the kinds of responses that are appropriate.

Wrap-Up: Putting it all Together

The Faculty, Reputation Institute (New York, USA)

The final session of the Program provides an in-depth discussion of real-world case studies of major companies conducted by Reputation Institute to showcase best practices in reputation management from around the world. The purpose of the session is to provide participants with an opportunity to see how leading companies are taking reputation management seriously, and the kinds of practices they are putting in place to create economic value from their most intangible assets.

 

View Overview | FAQs | Training Calendar | Register Now