Posts Tagged ‘brand reputation’

  Because I am off from work for the holiday, I have a little time to catch up on things I meant to read in the months before. I was particularly interested in some research on CEO transitions and its impact on the value of the enterprise conducted by FTI.  A few facts jumped out at me from their study among the financial community. They found that one-third (32%) of investor decisions are impacted by the reputation of the CEO. Moreover, the reputation of the CEO was more important to investors than the reputation of the company's products and services. The research covers the value at risk depending on what type of CEO transition occurred. The greatest risk to the enterprise is when a CEO is forced to resign. Because of my work on CEO tenures and how to build CEO reputation, the findings confirm my own research over the years that CEOs need to show success by that 12 month marker. FIT found that investors give new CEOs about six months to assess the challenges and opportunities facing the company, setting a vision and strategy.  They give new CEOs more leeway to improve market performance and valuation -- about 12 months. After the first year, all engines need to be firing. Another particularly interesting finding was what investors look at in their first 100 days to further establish the CEOs credibility in their eyes....here is what they said was of "significant importance." Despite the ranking for "charisma," it is still interesting that it is still estimated to be of high importance and only 16% said it was of limited importance.  FTI concludes that investors take a multi-dimensional view of new CEOs. They expect to see it all.

During First 100 Days Of A New CEO	“Significant importance”
Grasp of the company’s challenges and opportunities	96%
Knowledge of/experience with industry dynamics	92
Vision	88
Operational focus	88
A strategic plan	88
Leadership style	76
Charisma/personality	54

 FTI Consulting  

MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting just launched a new study that found that nearly 7 in 10 companies intend to accelerate their investment in sustainability this year. The global survey among 3,100 corporate leaders also found that improved brand reputation is the biggest benefit of addressing sustainability....nearly 50% agree that this is true.  Brand reputation seems to be the bottom line these days.

Came across an interesting statement about CEOs this morning. It was in a Justmeans  blog post about how CSR needs to get more humanized, meaning making a stronger link between the CSR director or manager with a company's CSR initiatives and thereby giving it a face. The author Akhila Vijayaraghavan wrote:

This year will see the beginning of a shift from CSR itself to the CSR practitioner. Just like brand image is beginning to collate itself with CEO image, so will CSR with the CSR practitioner/manager. I believe this could be an important trend because putting a 'face' on CSR makes it not so 'corporate'. CSR practitioners deal with far-reaching environmental, social and ethical issues on a daily basis that are profoundly human. Taking the corporate out of CSR will bring to the spotlight of what the people in businesses are really capable of . This is a good thing not just for CSR but also CSR practitioners.

As a long-time CEO reputation watcher and if I understand what she meant in her post (people often speak about brand and corporate reputation/image in the same breath), brands -- not just corporations -- will increasingly be linked with CEOs. For many years, the research I did found that nearly one half of a company's reputation was tied to that of its CEO. However, the reputation of the brand was not as tightly correlated until the Internet came along and changed the game. Now that anyone anywhere can find out the parent company of a brand and also who its CEO is, that is most probably changing. And I expect it will change quickly.

I caught up on some articles I was meaning to read over the long weekend. Here’s one worth noting when it comes to managing reputation online. Since we have extensively researched how executives manage their online reputations, I find everything that makes it easier to do so worthwhile reading. However, I wonder how anyone has the time to do all this and get their jobs done.

 

Robert Scoble in Fast Company says that “Reputations are created and destroyed online in the speed of 140 characters.”  He is obviously referring to Twitter and the common phrase today that reputation can be created (Susan Boyle) and destroyed overnight (Bernie Madoff). Scoble recommends seven tools available online, of course, for companies to monitor their reputations online. Thanks for the great list.

 

TweetDeck – the must have dashboard for the Twitter set (free) to determine what's being said about you in the Twitter and other worlds

Scout Labs – the sentiment and tone in which your brand reputation is being spoken about online (not free)

BlogPulse – taking the pulse on your reputation using keywords and a easy to use charting (free from Nielsen Online)

Vanno – “It’s Digg for reputation.”  (free)

CoTweet – multiple users can tweet from one user name (free) and manage your company reputation

TNS Cymfony – heavy duty tool for drilling deep into your online reputation among stakeholders (not free) (also similar tool from BuzzMetrics)

  

  Found this fascinating article about the financial services sector and reputation.  Saw it referenced on Twitter. It’s titled Rebuilding Trust with Enterprise Social Networking and describes how some financial services companies are using ERM (enterprise relationship management) effectively to network internally for external relationship-building.  If you are into that sort of thing, read it.  What interested me were two sentences at the top of the article: “Reputation and brand won’t carry the weight they did before the crisis. In this new world, where reputation is no longer enough to create confidence, people turn to trusted individuals.”  Although I realize the author was referring to internal trusted individuals who provide colleagues with access to relationships to grow business, it got me thinking about individual vs. collective reputation.  I think that most people are disenchanted with trusting individuals as much as they did. They just need to remind themselves of CEOs, presidents, investment advisors, politicians, journalists and many more that have let us down. The trust levels of most people of influence could not be lower.  Let’s not forget that many smart people trusted Bernie Madoff with their life savings because of his carefully built exclusive reputation. The recession has revealed many phonies behind those once golden reputations.   In my way of thinking, I believe that company and brand reputation are still going strong (with less fanfare than before) despite being misled by certain individual leaders.  Many company and brand reputations in select sectors are dented but not smashed. My sense is that there will be a resurgence of intense reputation-building as companies get back on their feet and realize that they must build enduring reputations for the long-term that are based on credibility, accountability and sound leadership. I think we haven’t seen anything yet!  Individual reputation-building might take a back seat to company reputation for a long while to come. Individual reputation-building will have to be carried out on behalf of the collective company reputation to really ring true.