Posts Tagged ‘company reputation’

What do CEOs think about the importance of the corporate vs. product brand? Luckily we were able to discern the answer when we looked at this group in our recent survey on The Company Behind the Brand: In Reputation We Trust.  96% of CEOs said that the corporate or parent brand is as important as the product brand. That is nearly 100% agreement.  Basically, they have little doubt of the corporate brands’ importance in this new age. Why would that be? Executives –across all four markets in our study– agreed that the primary impetus for the rising equality between corporate  brand and product brand is the reputation halo that the parent company brings to its products. Some might call it the reputation premium. Notably, the CEOs in our study cite the bottom-line as their number one reason for equalizing corporate and product brand. They essentially say that there is greater efficiency in marketing and communicating one overall corporate brand rather than several different brands. The concept of an “enterprise” brand that communicates the company’s reputation and product brands’ reputation all at once gets underscored in our new study.

As you may know if you follow this blog, Weber Shandwick took a deep look at where executives of the world’s most admired companies spoke in 2009 compared to earlier years. The analysis  (Five Star Conferences) showed that executives are ramping up their speaking engagements in an effort to get their messages out and narrate their company stories. At Weber Shandwick, we have a group dedicated to executive engagements that ultimately help boost and solidify company reputations. They are called our Global Strategic Media Group and they do fine work, including the analysis just mentioned! Since my days at Fortune, I have always been fascinated by executive conferences so it is a continuing interest of mine. Executive speaking is definitely one tool in the reputation tool box just like awards and scorecards, among other things.

We thought it would be equally interesting to see what executive communications professionals think about the executive conference scene and teamed with Vital Speeches and David Murray to query this segment. If you are an executive communications professional or executive speechwriter that positions CEOs and other C-level executives at top tier executive conferences, please take several minutes to answer this survey. We would greatly appreciate and will share the results once they are in!