Have
you got a reputation?
Remember
when your mother used to say, “you better behave, or you’ll get yourself a
reputation”? (or maybe it was only my mum?).
Robyn Griffith-Jones has taken this a step further and come up
with some advice to help you understand and safeguard your reputation.
Do you REALLY know how your organisation or business is perceived?
Most of us could lay our hands on bits of data in partial answer
to this question: sales figures, footfall, media cuttings, enquiries,
brochure conversion rates or website hits.
But
do you know what your REPUTATION is? What do your stakeholders
think
of you? Do they have an understanding of your long term goals?
Do all your staff feel comfortable representing the organisation?
At this point you can probably find some quotes from happy customers,
a piece of market research or talk about your ‘gut feel’.
But do you sometimes feel all this is a bit patchy and you’re
not quite sure what it all adds up to?
Why is reputation important?
We
judge everything in life, from businesses and governments to
our neighbours or
local pubs, by their reputation. We make value
judgements in making a decision about what we buy, who we support,
where we shop, who we work for and where we go on holiday. In a
competitive market, it’s easy for us to vote with our feet
and buy from someone whose reputation we ‘like’.
Reputation is important because it is provides the bedrock for
long term success. Reputation is a much more reliable indicator
of future performance than short term sales figures. If you understand
it and can measure it, it can tell you what sustains the loyalty
of your stakeholders and ultimately what provides differentiation
in the marketplace.
Reputation
is not just about whether you can withstand a disaster or a so-called ‘Ratner moment’.
Indeed, most significant damage to a reputation is caused by
a series of minor incidents,
some vocally dissatisfied customers or simply a sense of alienation
and frustration in not being able to contact you.
How do you measure it?
Large
corporations are just beginning to acknowledge the importance
of reputation
on the bottom line. MORI research in 2003 showed
that 48% of company CEOs (up from 8% in 1983) spontaneously mentioned
reputation as the main criteria they use to judge a company – ahead
of indicators such as financial performance and service quality.
This is likely to increase even more rapidly now that new government
regulations to modernise reporting practise will require large
companies to report on factors such as stakeholder relationships,
environmental impacts and the risks that underpin their financial
results.
Reputation
is perhaps best simply described as all your non-tangible assets
ie everything that is not included in the balance sheet.
For some large corporations, this can be enormous. Business in
the Community estimates that IBM’s brand and corporate reputation
value is 83% of its market capitalisation. More typically, non-tangible
assets represent about 70% of a company’s value.
People
working in tourism, leisure and hospitality tend to be more aware
of
the importance of reputation than in most sectors.
But because it’s hard to measure, few have actually put into
place simple reputation management plans that can help guide their
actions.
How can you help your organisation audit its reputation?
If you work in marketing or PR you are probably feeling pretty
pressurised. Communications technology means that everyone out
there is now empowered to contact you and to challenge you. You
are faced with incessant demands to respond and react and have
less and less time to think and plan ahead.
You probably are also feeling a little vulnerable. You may have
nominal charge of communications in your organisation, but feel
that actually you have very little control over them. The fragmentation
of sales and communications channels means that your traditional
methods of managing the message are being rapidly eroded.
When it comes to managing reputation, this problem is magnified
ten times over. Reputation, after all, is not the preserve of one
manager or department. Everyone in an organisation is involved
in one way or another. Indeed, as recent experience in large corporations
has shown, the reputation of an organisation ultimately rests with
the chief executive.
This is where a reputation health check can help, especially if
all your colleagues are beavering away in silos and loath to acknowledge
their role.
To get things started
Help your organisation acknowledge that reputation is an asset.
This may seem obvious, but reputation is still rarely explicitly
acknowledged in organisations’ management plans. And yet
you will have a much wider range of stakeholders to deal with
than even 10 years ago, including customers, government and regulators,
local community, media, analysts, suppliers, shareholders, employees,
consumer watchdogs and pressure groups.
Understand the landscape. A simple organisational or even departmental
SWOT analysis will help flush out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities
and threats that you face. Often, putting them down in black and
white is a helpful exercise for all. By involving everyone in the
process you can help stimulate debate, improve understanding and
create a sense of ownership of the challenges that you all face.
Build
reputation into your aims. Even if you can only build an element
of reputation
into your company’s or department’s
aims or vision, it will start to engage interest. British Waterways,
a part public funded and part commercial organisation with a complex
array of stakeholders, has tackled this quite well.
“Our ambition is that by 2012 we will have created an expanded,
vibrant, largely self-sufficient waterway network used by twice
as many people as in 2002. It will be regarded as one of the nation's
most important and valued national assets. Visitors will be delighted
with the quality of the experience and as a consequence many will
become active participants”.
Become a listening organisation
Reputation is a two way communications street. In fact, if you
are doing a good job, most of the traffic should be coming down
the street straight at you! How can you be ready for it?
Listen to your employees. Every organisation knows in theory that
its employees are ambassadors but are you using them as a sounding
board? All of them are meeting with stakeholders in one form or
another, whether answering the phone, delivering goods or manning
an exhibition stand. Do they feel confident representing the company,
its objectives and values? Do they all have the ability to feed
back honestly to you about what they hear? Do you feed back to
them?
Know
your stakeholders. Do you have a comprehensive, prioritised and
up to date list
of who they are? Do you know what they think
and want? How often do you contact them and how often do you speak
to them? Can they contact you easily and who should reply when
they do? Do you have the basics in place, such as a newsletter,
or regular briefings or website with lots of relevant ‘sticky
content’ that draws people back and back again?
Design a reputation management system.
Establish a few simple building blocks to engage the organisation.
Risk
management. Most risks arise not because of unforeseen events
but because
of things well within an organisation’s control.
Can you develop a list of all the things that can go wrong that
could affect external perception of what you do? Involve the whole
organisation in the process, perhaps at the same time as doing
the SWOT analysis. Sketch out how and who should deal with the
problem.
Simple message matrix. You will want different things from each
of your stakeholders. From some you will want funding, from some
policy support, from some sales. A simple way of clarifying this
is to develop with your colleagues an organisational message matrix,
outlining each audience, the main channels you use to reach them
and what you want the desired response to be. Remember to review
regularly, especially whether desired responses have been achieved.
Key
account management. Do each of your stakeholders have an ‘internal
account manager’ they can be sure of reaching? This is usually
reasonably easy to set up, engages and empowers broad numbers of
staff and releases the bottleneck that can be created in the Marketing
and PR department. This is also a good way of developing a list
of allies, or friends that can be called on and who will speak
publicly for you. Third party endorsement is one of the quickest
ways to deflect criticism and increase reputation.
Develop the communications manual. This is a prerequisite to getting
employees and the organisation on board and setting up a successful
key account management system. Do you have a set of key words,
phrases and pictures - a sort of DIY communications manual - that
the whole organisation can use? It is important to ensure that
employees are comfortable about what is public and what is not,
and the easiest way to tackle this is to operate as though everything
you say and do is public. While there will always be the need for
some exceptions, a good rule of thumb is never to produce a briefing
that you would not be happy for a stakeholder to see.
And finally, establish your reputation benchmarks. You can only
report on your success if you have an ongoing monitor. Some large
companies have developed expensive tailor-made indices that arrive
at a single figure covering all quantitative and qualitative measures.
But it can be done much more simply than that, as long as you adopt
a reasonably small number of measures that can be understood and
remembered by all and that can be publicised regularly both internally
and externally.
You may decide for example that your reputation monitor will consist
of six elements, for example customer responses/feedback, number
of third party endorsements, quality of media coverage, number
of key account management contacts, sales figures and market research.
Optimally, if you can, you should establish a regular survey to
measure perception. For example, if your goal is to increase awareness
in the local community, then an annual omnibus poll (you may be
able to use local students or volunteers) is what you need. If
your task is broader, then telephone surveys can be done reasonably
cheaply.
As
you can see, reputation is not the preserve of one individual.
Reputation
success in our information age means involving and empowering
the whole organisation. While the PR and Marketing team can act
as the catalyst and put the health check in place, the final owner
of an organisation’s reputation has to be the man or woman
at the top.
The
value of reputation was certainly understood by American millionaire
businessman
Warren Buffet who said: ‘If you lose dollars
for the firm by bad decisions, I will be understanding. If you
lose reputation for the firm, I will be ruthless.’
Robyn Griffith-Jones
robyn@plancommunications.co.uk
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