Reputation Risk Management

Scrutiny of corporate behavior has reached unprecedented levels, and reputation is increasingly the currency by which corporations succeed and fail. While companies generally survive reputational crises, management groups often do not. Any management must develop a clear strategy for crisis avoidance.

Global Strategic Communications, Inc., helps each client engage both with capital markets and its broader environment to understand where the risks lie. We believe that what the world thinks matters. We help our clients develop market intelligence, and we design and implement mechanisms that make it usable by senior decision-makers. We are constantly benchmarking best practices among companies that are most successful at reputation risk management and delivering this knowledge to our clients’ benefit.

At a time when reputations of some best-known companies have been sinking, reputation, itself, has emerged as a prime driver of corporate value. Today, billions of dollars in purchasing decisions are made on opinions of companies’ financial and social conduct. And more billions flow into and out of companies based on investor perceptions of their ability to grow their businesses. These two kinds of perception are deeply related.

There are few more powerful assets that senior managers can bring to their decision-making process than the knowledge of how investors make decisions to buy and sell the company's securities. Global Strategic Communications, Inc., provides a comprehensive set of strategies and tools that bring management an understanding of the perceptions that govern their fate, and the structures and procedures to do something about them.

How We Do Our Work

We begin with a relationship. Our clients are generally willing to spend some time with us discussing the reasons their investors behave as they do. They talk about what they've heard and about their hunches. From these conversations we partner with the client to design a list of questions to be asked of portfolio managers and analysts as the foundation of an Open Perception StudyT, or, if the client prefers, a Reputation Assessment. If it seems worthwhile, we expand the participants group to include a broader constituency that might comprise other investment professionals, vendors, customers, and relevant NGO's. Although senior management talks to their investors and analysts every day, they are often surprised by what we bring them from our third-party conversations.

One of the Open Perception Study's most important features is that our discussions with market participants go far beyond the questionnaire. In fact, the questionnaire's primary function is to serve as a launch pad for a much broader discussion that includes answers to all its questions, but also reveals questions the client did not know to ask. This is one of the ways reputation risk is revealed.

We deliver our results in a live presentation and an elaborate written report that includes:

• Highly-detailed findings of the Study.
• Suggestions on corporate strategy.
• Suggestions on communication strategy.
• Suggestions on internal structures that:
  • Instill a company-wide understanding of the approach to reputation management.
  • Assure that current and future market intelligence will be available to senior decision-makers.

Our clients generally engage us to help in the implementation of new structures and to remain available for periodic review.

Reputation Risk Management Seminars

Reputation is everybody’s job, and education is particularly challenging in large, complex organizations. The hard work and good intentions of senior management can easily go to waste if the staff is not on board. Our seminars deliver the WHY of risk management to staff at all levels. We make these sessions fun and engrossing, particularly by associating basic principles of reputation risk management to the headlines of the moment.