We have seen that in recent time the spotlight has been put on Corporate America in a way that has not been seen since the Great Depression. Newspaper polls suggest that many investors and members of the general public no longer trust Wall Street and corporate boards for obvious reasons. In order to try to restore the reputation of Corporate America, politicians and law makers are suggesting more stringent reporting and controls. Does it make sense for a company to try to form its reputation in such a way that it helps to gain a competitive advantage relative to its industry rivals?

Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin group of companies in the UK had advised senior managers to build their corporate brands not around products and services, but around their company’s reputation. In order to consider whether to compete on one’s corporate reputation is a sensible strategy, managers need answers to the following questions:

- What are corporate reputations and can they be crafted to provide an advantage over those of other industry rivals?

- How are corporate reputations validated?
- What type of reputation should be fostered?

Let us explore what is corporate reputation and how is it formed? A dictionary defines a reputation as the estimation in which a person or thing is held by other people. A corporate reputation is an overall evaluation that reflects the extent to which people see the firm as substantially “good” or “bad.” Good reputations foster trust and confidence, bad ones do not. Corporate image is a person’s beliefs about an organization, and corporate identity is the attributes used to describe an organization. Thus, corporate image means that we are talking about people’s perceptions of the organization and answers the question “What do people think about you?” Corporate identity refers to the way that the organization presents itself to its stakeholders and answers the question “Who are you?” An organization develops and highlights the parts of its identity that it hopes will foster a better image than its rivals in the minds of key stakeholders. If this occurs, the organization is said to have a good reputation.

For an organization to use its corporate reputation as a competitive weapon it must initiate a set of programmes to shape its identity, namely, its character, ability, products and services, and its behavior so that these will be evaluated favorably by its key stakeholders—relative to that of its industry rivals. Two basic options are either to foster a broad-based “good” reputation that will resonate with all stakeholders or one that is anchored to a specific identity attribute that is highly valued by one or more key stakeholder groups.

In some industries, it is important for competitors to have a broad-based good reputation. Trust and confidence in the organization is a strategic factor in its success. Those organizations that lead their rivals in this endeavor can gain a competitive advantage. In other industries, the establishment of a good corporate reputation is anchored to an attribute of the organization that is of particular importance to target customers and/or a key stakeholder groups. In both cases, corporate reputation can be a strategic asset that provides a source of potential competitive advantage. An organization that seeks to compete on its corporate reputation does so by choosing to promote some of its identity attributes or to publicly trade on its good name. In both cases, the corporate brand name is used to direct attention to the organization as the source of some type of communication, such as advertising, press releases, sponsorships, community activities, and investor relations.

For an organization to be a persuasive source of communication, it must be perceived as either:

- Credible, e.g., expert, objective,
- Attractive, e.g., likable, similar to the stakeholder, or
- Powerful, e.g., authoritative, influential.

The question then arises as to how can an organization present itself as credible and/or attractive and/or powerful? John Rossiter and Larry Percy suggest that because claims made by the organization will be carefully considered, they should be:

- Emotionally authentic (and this needs to be checked as it will vary across stakeholder groups)

- Convincing, that is, pitched to build on, or gently refute, the target stakeholder’s current beliefs.

Maintaining a good reputation requires constant vigilance. The actions of a rogue employee can quickly damage such a reputation. Also, it is easy for a company to pronounce its good intentions but fail to put in place formal procedures to ensure and measure compliance. To make a reasoned judgment, managers need to understand how good reputations are formed and maintained. This understanding suggests that the organization’s behavior is the prime determinant of its reputation. This will be driven by its overall system—such things as its strategy, business process, culture, controls, employees, and governance. Another crucial reputation driver is the value proposition offered to customers Also, the integrity of the top team —the Board, CEO, and executive managers—play a crucial role in personifying and creating trust and confidence in the company. Because different stakeholder groups often hold different reputations of an organization, managers need to address the problem of achieving a balance among the competing interests of their stakeholders.

To sum it up, a corporate reputation reflects the organization’s strategy, culture, and values. A good corporate reputation signifies trust in the company; creates an emotional and intellectual bond with employees, target customers, and other important stakeholders; and acts as the source of authority and credibility for all the organization’s dealings.

Militant as I sound, it must be the general pall of slow down in Bombay, IPOs tanking, doomsayers with the recession din, the taxi strike, the weather, and the general non happenings of the week.

The only things that I am a little excited about are some tools for research that I have had a chance to play with recently. These have long been used international PR firms and it is quite interesting to to see their slow acceptance and investment in these tools by Indian PR firms too.

We live in a world of Information Overload and Insight Scarcity. Have you ever wondered when a 26-year old from a management consulting company presents at an industry forum, leaving everyone spell bound by trends and the insight he or she spouts? Similarly how investment banking professionals get the detailed information to discover synergies that decide when to merge and acquire companies, or top Sales people to design and sell solutions for their customers? These are the tools that leading professionals use to know about their customers, markets and industry in real time!

I don’t have the time!

In the PR business, whether it is preparing for a meeting with your client; writing a new business pitch or presentation, or writing a pitch note for the journalist, there is always a chronic shortage of time. In a landscape dotted with delivery milestones, reviews, internal processes and various other mundane activities that are urgent but not important these reserach tools come really handy. They help save time in searching for information, time which is then saved for analyzing and surfacing insight to finally arrive at a positioning statement or stance in the media. It further helps do a snapshot of where a client is at, and where he aspires to be in terms of peer group companies and competition. If you have the first two licked, finding a workable communication strategy to reach these objectives finally comes on the horizon.

What is required is actionable intelligence to optimize your communications strategy, this intelligence today is not just about the good old print medium but requires media analysis across traditional and social media. The ability to benchmark competitors, find PR weak spots, defining focus areas-which sectors, which markets? Finally an ability to track the drivers of your clients’ corporate reputation!

I am referring to the information databases, news aggregators and news wires, prominent among which is Factiva, a tool that is an effective news aggregator and search tool. Besides the latest news on a Company or topic that you may be researching across sources of media reporting on a company or topic, the issues at hand, stick price changes, key executives and a lot of other information it would take you weeks to gather from multiple sources.

In addition, Factiva has something known as Search 2.0 that throws up graphs and through other pictorial visualization tools like heat maps really useful to depict trends. Trends that can help you understand the success of your PR campaign; the effectiveness of your spokesperson and measure your success to show bang for the buck!

There are others such as Datamonitor, Hoovers which are again general business research tools. In addition, you will discover deep dive tools for different domains such as a Gartner, Forrester, IDC, for Information Technology, and Ovum for Telecom related information. Similarly for information of a financial nature there are tools like a Dow Jones, Reuters Knowledge, Thomson Financials, and Bloomberg. I can go on and on but will close here to say that there are best-in-breed research tools out there for pretty much most domains and these can change you life if your information needs are critical for your business decision making and survival in reputation management.

In a time often replete with 25 hour work days; these tools help you climb a growth curve which would be pretty much uphill if not impossible as a PR professional, without the help of these tools. In these days of consolidation in the PR space, it may well prove the magic bullet to enable the local tigers and independents to hold their own as they scale up the ladder to compete with their MNC peers who are old users of these tools.

The challenges in adoption are of overcoming inertia and building a research-based PR culture besides of course having some bean counter sign a cheque. Mind you some of these databases do not come cheap but the benefits in time saved and the value of the information that news aggregators provide, more than justifies the investment.

The information age is here and the question is does your organization have an information strategy and tools to take the next big leap?