A Good Corporate Reputation Starts with a Good Corporate Brand

Most communications professionals do not recognize that building a good reputation is directly linked to the relevance their corporate brand has with key stakeholders. Too often, public relations and communications professionals try distance themselves from the term brand, arguing that it is related to marketing and advertising and narrowly focused on products and customers. This is not and should not be the case.

Brand management should be focused on identifying the values and attributes of the organization that resonate with key stakeholders. Reputation management, which communications professionals often refer to as "being known for doing good", suggests correctly that reputation is a derivative of actions by the organization that are relevant with key stakeholders. In other words, reputation is a vote by stakeholders that the brand attributes are important and relevant to the stakeholder.

If reputation management is not linked to brand management, one risks trying to build reputation through corporate responsibility programs, which although important are tactics, not strategies. The only way external communications programs can work is if they are supported by the actions of the company, and that means that the company must have the values, be able to deliver consistently on its desired attributes, and be able to build relationships with its stakeholders.

On the other side of the wrong perceptions of brand and reputation management are those advertising and brand professionals who think that brand is related to logo, design changes or slogans alone. Those are simply symbols that should help illuminate and help build associations for the brand. But, we should always recognize that when we talk about building a brand or changing a brand, we are talking about identifying attributes and linking actions with communications. Both the PR and design perspectives often minimize the importance of linking the concepts of brand and reputation.