Corporate Reputations
Corporate reputation can make or break an organization. It is a long slow process to build this reputation and unfortunately it can be lost overnight. Reputation loss can significantly erode the ability of the business to successfully retain market share, maximize shareholder value, raise finance, manage debt, and remain independent.
Organizations take hits to their reputation on a continual basis. It is one of the facts of life of being in business. This happens across the board in all types of industries.
Major corporations take hits to their reputation all the time, but the problem has rarely seemed as pervasive as during the recent pileup of business scandals. Alsop, a marketing columnist and editor at the Wall Street Journal, studies companies from a broad range of industries to show how a corporation can make a name for itself, then maintain that reputation or fix it when things go wrong. Harris Interactive supplies plenty of poll data to gauge public perception, but the real meat of this book lies in the stories Alsop tells about specific companies. His examples are detailed and immediate, from Coca-Cola’s use of its Web site to debunk persistent urban legends to the disastrously slow corporate response when a flustered Starbucks employee made World Trade Center rescue workers pay for bottled water. Some companies come in for particularly close scrutiny, such as Phillip Morris, for trying to shed its big tobacco image by renaming itself the Altria Group. And Alsop’s not afraid to call things as he sees them. He criticizes Martha Stewart’s attempts to spin her bad publicity and declares McDonald’s “had better hurry up and give people more reasons to love it,” suggesting a new ad campaign won’t make up for poor customer service. That feistiness permeates much of his advice, as when he suggests to business owners that “most activists are your enemy,” but the tone is combative without being offensive. And though some of the conclusions may seem obvious, executives will likely find the book an effective basic primer for dealing with public image.
Alsop is a senior reporter for the Wall Street Journal and I have read many of his stories over the years. I am glad that someone of his caliber has addressed the issue of corporate reputaion at a time when big business ranks about equal to politicians in public perception. Even the mafia is thought to be less sleazy!!
Alsop starts with a basic, uncontestable premise: A corporation’s reputation is one of its most valuable assets. This determines how much slack a cynical public will cut it when things start to go wrong. Other assets – such as those that show up on the balance sheet – are carefully measured, tracked and managed. Reputations are not. Not even by so-called excellently managed companies.
Next Alsop lays out various ‘laws’ to help a company manage its reputation. The first two just talk about how important it is and how important it is to measure it. Then he becomes much more interesting as he starts laying out what a company should do build and maintain a sterling reputation.
He stresses how important it is for a company to ‘live’ its values and ethics and why being defensive is actually offensive. These could be bromides. What gives them value are Alsop’s anecdotes drawn from a lifetime of reporting on business. These well selected stories not only illustrate his points, they also show the reader how to implement his ideas in their own situation. And there are hundreds os such stories.
For example, Alsop talks about how being socially responsible can be an important component of a sterling reputation. And he relates how Timberland does it with a range of initiatives from monitoring labor practices at its contractors’ overseas factories to giving its employees the opportunity to do community service on company time. And he doesn’t stop there. He tells what dozens of other companies do from Johnson & Johnson to Paul Newman’s food company.
These stories and examples are, by far, the best part of the book. This is where the value resides and it is not at all difficult to take each of these examples and suitably modify it to use in your situation.
An excellent book. My one quibble is a philosophical one. I think Alsop is too easy on companies like Altria – the former Phillip Morris. Does having an exemplary ethics code with lots of employee input compensate for the fact that its core product kills when used as intended? You make up your mind on that one. Alsop shows how Altria does a lot of things right in terms of global cultural sensitivity but I would simply not have used such an example.
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