reputation and trust management
Corporate reputation and trust are a company’s most important assets, and must be handled carefully. That is especially true today, as corporate leaders operate in a tumultuous global business environment, face an increasingly demanding set of well-informed stakeholders, and grapple with the latest stage of the digital revolution.
Managing one’s reputation in this new environment requires companies to respond adeptly to a litany of potentially dangerous issues and disruptions while staying focused on their long-term growth and market goals. While there are numerous risks to consider in this environment, there are also substantial rewards. By identifying a company’s assets and weaknesses in the realm of trust, AaronRichards help corporations uncover, define, exemplify and amplify their authentic identity in ways that resonate with stakeholders and inspire support of their business mission.
Our approach to building holistic trust and reputation management starts with benchmarking attitudes and opinions and indexing the strength of relationships among critical stakeholder groups—employees, partners, suppliers, customers, investors, regulators, legislators, NGOs, news media, community leaders and the general public. And then we bring business together with society to help forge critical changes.
Elements of our strategy include:
- Developing a research-driven positioning strategy recommending actions that resonate with key stakeholders;
- Crafting compelling, rigorously-tested language that articulates this positioning;
- Creating a message architecture to align leaders around consistent messaging;
- Executing communications programs which ensure that executive positioning, internal communications, stakeholder engagement and media relations all tell a consistent story.
We use this comprehensive, integrated approach when we are positioning a CEO as an industry thought leader, driving an important change initiative through the workforce, managing mergers and restructurings, dealing with a crisis or facilitating dialogue between corporate entities and the public.
We help clients build and protect the value of their reputations with services that include:
- Trends in the reputation landscape
- Reputation diagnostics
- Reputation surveys among key stakeholders
- CEO reputation-building/First 100 Day Plans
- Social CEO planning and execution
- Executive thought leadership platforms
- Reputation vulnerability audits
- Reputation recovery and repair
Corporations have quickly realized that reputation is a major contributor to market value. A hit to an organization’s reputation can have real, long-standing negative impacts to the bottom line.
Because it is more difficult to recover from a reputation failure than it is to build and maintain reputations, safeguards need to be in place to help even the most respected organizations preserve and protect their reputations.
New rules of engagement apply today when it comes to an institution’s reputation. We help clients build and enhance reputations, engage with stakeholders and the public through social media, identify the triggers of reputation failure, safeguard reputation and implement actionable reputation management strategies.