17. Corporate Reputation

Reputation is a belief or an impression that is held about an organisation, and bears both psychological and social connotations. Today’s dynamic world has brought in a new reality for corporations that pose a range of challenges and opportunities for creation or even destruction of reputation. Corporations have to manage a complex reality of heightened customer demands, civil society expectations, a 24 * 7 news cycle, live social media, regulatory crackdown, cyber threats, an empowered employee voice and citizen journalism (the list can go on) that present unprecedented pressures on an organisation for it to navigate through in a sensible manner. Corporate reputation management has emerged as a specialised discipline to guide and support organisations pre-empt, prepare and respond to the dynamic environment they exist in so that its business interest can be safeguarded in the long run. For a long time, corporate reputation may have been about image management where Public Relations (PR) firms would devise tactics to ensure that the right kinds of perceptions are created about the organisation in the eyes of the public. However, greater public awareness and sensitivity have ensured that corporate reputation does not remain an image management gimmick, but is considered as a core business imperative that needs to be reflected in an organisation’s ethos and spirit. In this chapter, I intend to share my perspectives on corporate reputation management. This will include why it is more important to think reputation now than ever before and how a systemic approach to reputation management can be adopted by consultants working in this field.