Improve your business' reputation

While business leaders consistently rank reputation as one of any company’s most valuable assets they are often unwilling to invest the time and resources necessary to build a strong reputation for their own organisations. 

By Mike King, managing director, Johnson King PR

Having a strong reputation is clearly understood as being integral to corporate success. No surprises there. What is surprising is how many business leaders lack the commitment to build such a reputation.

I’m not entirely sure why, but many seem to believe that their company will magically develop a reputation for being forward thinking and successful. But these things just don’t happen by accident.

If you want your customers (and future customers) to see your company as innovative, you need to tell them about the innovative things you do. Similarly, if you want them to know you are the fastest growing company in your field, you need to give them the facts to demonstrate your progress.

Companies build strong reputations by focusing on the critical elements of their business (such as customer service, product quality, innovation, financial performance and employee relations) and then going out of their way to publicise what they do in these areas.

By the same token, public relations, an industry that has grown dramatically in the past few decades and one that exists solely for the purpose of enhancing reputations and establishing credibility, is often misunderstood and undervalued. 

Is it a coincidence that Richard Branson, widely admired and regaled as a business genius and often held up as the shining example of successful entrepreneurship, is a man who puts more effort into PR than most other business leaders?  Not so.

Research into the most admired companies (including the Fortune magazine annual survey of corporate reputation shows that rankings are strongly influenced by perceived quality of a management. 

Chief executive and company reputation are very closely linked. Some studies claim that as much as 50 per cent of a company’s reputation is attributable to the reputation of the person at the helm. 

So it is not just about a company’s financial performance or its market share. Leadership qualities such credibility, integrity and the ability to communicate, all have a significant bearing on a company’s reputation and its industry standing.

Corporate reputation needs to have a strong bearing on the way that your organisation promotes itself, the style of PR campaigns that are executed and, critically, the quality and seniority of the spokespeople you put forward. 

Positioning your senior executives in the media should be central to your PR focus. This necessitates a much more sophisticated approach to PR than simply sending out generic press releases and hoping some journalists will pick up on the story.

To have real impact you need to adopt a more personalised approach to PR, with information tailored to meet the specific requirements and interests of each journalist.

This is where a good PR agency will really come into its own. A team of PR specialists who are dealing with your target media day-in day-out are well positioned to understand the media landscape and the specific styles and interests of the different journalists you target. 

This, combined with an independent perspective and a real handle on the hot topics and issues that you can comment on, will enable a decent PR agency to develop a campaign that positions your senior executives as real industry experts.

It is through such issues-driven campaigns that you can establish your company’s credibility and market leadership. Mindlessly dull press releases will not only fail to pique the media’s interest, they’ll position your company as uninspiring. And that won’t help your corporate reputation one bit.

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By Mike King  on   Jul 13,2008

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Keywords

reputation    brand    Branson    leadership    PR   

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