Do you know your organization’s reputation among its most important stakeholders? Corporate reputation is the sum of all the perceptions we hold about an organization, including its products or services, leadership and workplace, personality and identity, financial performance and corporate social responsibility.
Do your stakeholders’ perceptions match the way your organization wants to be seen? Having an accurate picture of what is shaping your corporate image, and where you may not be meeting expectations, helps focus your team’s efforts to manage and improve your firm’s reputation.
Here are three things to consider in developing a reputation measurement system for your organization:
1. Seek out internal perspectives.
Reputation manifests in different ways for Board and senior leadership teams versus those interacting daily with stakeholders. Take advantage of the insight that exists within your organization! Consulting widely inside your organization helps you understand the full range of factors influencing your reputation. Involving internal stakeholders early also ensures the output of your research is relevant and useful to all parts of the organization – helping gain buy-in. In-house reputation conversations are also a great opportunity to gauge how reputation research will connect into, and ideally complement, other brand or corporate initiatives.
2. Decide who you need to hear from.
All organizations have multiple stakeholders; these can include customers, partners, investors, funders, governments and regulators, donors, and the wider public. Typically, organizations have customer or public segments who are especially valuable or important to them. We work closely with clients to identify the groups with whom they most wish to enhance, repair, or reinforce their reputation. We also work to determine the best ways of engaging these key segments. For example, one-on-one interviews are typically preferable to surveys for high-value stakeholders; it’s often worth investing in more intensive forms of engagement to show respect for these stakeholders’ knowledge and expertise and to gain more nuanced insight into their perspectives.
3. Select the right reputation metrics.
Reputation research is only useful if you can isolate the measures that truly drive your reputation. We work with our clients to cast a wide net: what has historically driven the organization’s reputation? Are you working to reposition yourselves? What metrics are generally important for your industry or competition? What have you learned from previous research or branding efforts? Sometimes, initial qualitative research (focus groups) is valuable to ensure you have a good lay of the land before embarking on quantitative work.
These three principles apply to organizations of any size and working in any industry. Using these techniques means having a reputation measurement system customized to your organization – one that is flexible over time and responsive to emerging issues and information needs.
