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Governance Research Digest – January 2012

Summary

The Fellows of the Ethics Resource Center (ERC) have assembled insights from brand management and public relations gurus to produce a guide on how to establish, develop, and protect a corporation’s reputation of being an honest broker in the marketplace. The guide will help executives maneuver through the increasingly complicated landscape on the path to “Building a Corporate Reputation of Integrity.”

Key Findings

• Now more than ever, consumers consider a company’s reputation when shopping for goods and services.
• As with a new service or product, the odds of success are generally better when based on an empirical founda¬tion about audiences and how they think.
• Establishing a benchmark of stakeholders’ existing perceptions provides a valuable starting point for developing communications goals and strategies.
• Knowing what employees think is invaluable.
• Line workers tend to know where problems exist, and they also understand a company’s strengths from firsthand experience.
• Employees can be a company’s best advocate if they feel good about where they work and have confidence in its commitment to integrity.
• They also can be a company’s worst enemy if they are dissatisfied in some way.
• Breaking out of silos is key to making reputation and ethics a shared responsibility.
• One way to do that is to by understanding colleagues’ responsibilities and the challenges they face.
• Pushing into new skill areas is an¬other way to break down needless distinctions between internal functions.
• For example, ethics officers can be trained to act as company spokespeople in appropriate circumstances and also how to communicate most effectively to external and internal audiences alike.
• Communications staff can be trained to understand the ethics and compliance department’s programmatic activities and the basic concepts of how people can uphold corporate values.
• Communications experts tell us reputation can be enhanced when CEOs and other senior executives are also effective and ag-gressive external advocates.
• Identifying senior leaders with the right skills to become effective messengers is a way to burnish reputation and also build a company’s internal culture.
• As discussed previously, reputation building may require a change in the way key audiences think and achiev¬ing that goal is not likely to happen by itself.
• Rather, it will require the right messages and an effective strategy for delivering them.
• Working together, the ethics and compliance team and the communications function can identify schemas that need to change and develop strategies for changing them.

Author(s)

Ethics Resource Center

Source

PDF report

Tags: brand management, corporate reputation, ERC, Ethics Resource Center, integrity, public relations