On Top Of The Game
How reputation keeps your organisation above the crowd
02/2010




Once you've lost your reputation, you can enjoy an uninhibited life. So says an old German proverb, one that, unfortunately, does not apply to business. Companies remain at the mercy of their reputation, a message brought home to us by the ongoing global economic and financial market crisis. Companies need to be given the famous "license to operate" by stakeholder groups from all corners of society. Today's audiences are more wary, if not down-right sceptical, than ever before. Non-transparent and opaque corporate behaviour in the recent past, combined with howling communication disasters such as BP's Deepwater Horizon debacle, have generated a level of suspicion that, rather than focus on an individual party, sweeps across whole industries. Additionally, the number of channels through which a company's reputation can be affected has grown, requiring increased levels of monitoring, if not an entirely new approach. The plethora of challenges presented by those developments must be tackled by communications professionals. Given the amount of variables involved in building up a company's good name - employee relations, crisis communications, CSR - reputation management is as much an art as a science, and therein lies the challenge for those of us whose job is to tell the story of an organisation to a critical audience. Among this issue's articles, we look at how BP shows that once company's troubles can affect the global standing of an entire industry, how sponsorship of the World Cup helped South Africa' First National Bank develop their image both internally and to international audiences, how Adidas respond to questions over its collaboration with overseas suppliers, and the serious reputational risks inherent in social media campaigns.

Marc-Oliver Voigt
Editor-in-Chief
m.voigt@communication-director.eu