Introducing a Board-Level Framework to Monitor — and Influence — Reputation Value and Risk
By Aidan Ryan and Charlie Baldwin
Everyone has a stake in reputation. Corporate Comms shapes it, Marketing promotes it, Insights monitors it, Risk insures it, and Finance tracks its contribution to enterprise value. Legal may step in to help protect it, while a misstep anywhere in the company can damage it in minutes. Ultimately, reputation is the board’s responsibility — a mission-critical asset that corporate directors are legally required to protect.
But as leaders sought to protect and boost their corporate reputation, they lacked a single methodology or measure that could work for everyone. The old ways of measuring reputation couldn’t answer the C-Suite's most pressing questions, like:
Reputation Forecast from We. Communications is built to answer these questions. It’s the first methodology to combine an already proven measure of reputation value and risk from the insurance industry with a multistakeholder, multichannel view of the conversations, sentiments and preferences that shape those intangibles. It’s quick and often inexpensive to implement and yields immediate insights to drive smarter, more efficient, and more risk-resilient communications and business strategies.
We started from the premise that any credible method to monitor reputation value and risk needed to meet the follow core requirements:
Although others may model hypothetical “what-if” scenarios based on media, social and sentiment data, or assign arbitrary scores to arbitrary attributes, We. brings financial-grade measurement and narrative context — ensuring that leadership not only sees the numbers but understands the story behind them.
Our industry has known for years that social conversations, media coverage, and polling results, while important, don’t come close to reflecting the beliefs and preferences of a polarized, fast-moving public. We’ve known that sentiment doesn’t always map to action. In other words, what someone posts online or says to a pollster isn’t always consistent with where they choose to shop or work. As corporate reputation gained importance in the boardroom, increasingly sophisticated methodologies for measuring it still failed to map onto financial performance and business outcomes.
We took a step back from the problem and recognized that measurements of the value of corporate reputation already existed — in fact, these data underpinned everything from insurance policies to investments to settlement agreements. Although the insurance and financial industries had long ago settled on methods for valuing corporate reputation, they lacked a perspective for shaping reputation and reducing risk. In other words, they were missing the human element. That’s where We. comes in.
We partnered with Steel City Re, the insurance advisory firm that introduced the world’s first reputation risk insurance policy nearly 25 years ago. By combining their proven measures of reputation value and risk with our best-in-class, AI-powered stakeholder intelligence tools, we were able to create a multidimensional view of reputation.
Taken together, Steel City Re’s RVM and RVV provide publicly traded companies with essential reputation value benchmarking (backward-looking) and risk-sensing or forecasting (forward-looking).
They’re so successful that, in addition to Steel City Re’s insurance products, they also inform three reputation premium-seeking equity indices: RepuSPX, RepuVAR and RepuVART regularly outperform the S&P 500, sometimes by as much as 500%. Because of this, hedge funds and other investors directly purchase Steel City Re’s data to inform their strategies.
For communicators, marketers and heads of reputation, the real value comes in overlaying Steel City Re’s approach with rich contextualizing data from media coverage, social media, sentiment, share of voice, audience polling and other sources. Although the topline risk and value picture provide board-level utility, working practitioners have a source of unassailable truth about corporate reputational health that can serve as an anchor to better contextualize issues and opportunities. Benchmarked against competitors and tracked over time, a fascinating picture emerges.
Reputation Forecast can provide immediate, actionable insights about the real relationship between corporate reputation value and factors including:
These insights can shape smarter and more cost-efficient integrated strategies.
And in the heat of a crisis or emerging issue, the ability to block out the noise and isolate reputational signals from individual stakeholder groups is invaluable in appropriately targeting and calibrating communications.
Reputation Forecast powers clients’ monthly reputation benchmarking, in-depth research into the impact of recurring or industrywide issues, and even the timing of board-level decisions around executive moves. The uses are limitless.
Curious about your company's reputation value, risk and resilience? Get in touch.
Aidan Ryan | aidanr@wecommunications.com
Charlie Baldwin | cbaldwin@wecommunications.com
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