Three Key Questions to Ask About Your Reputation

Those doing reputation research often turn to opinion polling data which tells them how well they are liked or admired compared to others in the same sector. This is interesting, but it does not give us much to work on. Research needs to be applied--be prescriptive, not just descriptive.

I believe that there are three key questions that those looking at reputation need to address:

1. How important are the attributes that we are building our reputation on to the stakeholders for whom they are intended?

2. How do we compare in terms of expectations versus the experience that stakeholders believe they actually have received from us?

3. How do we compare vs. the "ideal" that stakeholders have for a company in our sector?

Getting at these three questions will not be done by normative, survey research. These generate normative or ordinal data. Interesting to observe but offering little understanding of how intense stakeholders feel about us or what we can do to close gaps or improve on our current programs.

In terms of reputation research, surveys of what people think of a company at a certain point in time are akin to a professor giving a student a grade and not telling them why the grade was given. The "A" student does not know how to replicate; the "F" student doesn't know how to improve.

By employing research methodology that lends itself to linear data analysis, we can get not only the answers to the above questions, but we also can see the gaps between ourselves and others.

Fortune magazine's survey of the "Most Admired Corporations" is liked by a lot of corporations, not only because it tells them where they are relative to their competition, but the data also gives them information on each of the 9 attributes analyzed. So, we get an overall set of aggregate data as well as the information on the attributes. This research is linear--it is done through factor analysis. The real problem with the Fortune data, in my opinion, is that I could never tell how important the attributes were to the respondent. The researchers argue that as one ranks, one gives a perspective of importance, but much of Fortune's study is also a popularity contest because companies within the industry are voting for themselves and for others.

The "ideal" question is an important one. We need to know where we and others in our peer and competitive set are relative to an "ideal". The closer we get to the ideal, the more likely we are to exceed stakeholder expectation, create differentiation, and enhance our reputation.