Bully Pulpit Study: What Makes Brands Resilient In Crisis

• More than half (53%) of consumers believe any given piece of misinformation about the average company.
• In the current environment,“You're going to get hit. Everybody's going to get hit.” What matters is“how quickly you're able to come back.”
• While two car companies were trusted by the same percentage of respondents, one ranked in the 70^th percentile for resilience, while the other ranked in the 22^nd percentile.
• Having leadership that cares about something other than just profit, being led by values, is the biggest contributor to reputational resilience
• A lot of brands“are maybe a bit too diffuse in how they're communicating and they're telling too many stories and not the stories that really matter.”

A combination of political, economic, social, environmental, and technological disruption has created a new climate for corporations and their senior communicators. Often characterized as a“permacrisis,” it is, more accurately, a permanent state of polycrisis , in which multiple crises in various systems interact and exacerbate each other, creating a situation where the overall impact is greater than the sum of the individual crises.

At the same time, stakeholders are skeptical of the companies with whom they do business. According to research from corporate and public affairs specialist Bully Pulpit International, just 48% of consumers trust brands to do the right thing: one in five say that they have no trust at all. And for the average company, 53% of consumers believe any given piece of misinformation.

There is a growing realization that traditional ideas of crisis response are inadequate to deal with this level of turmoil. Crises can no longer be avoided, or even managed in the conventional sense; indeed, some communications professionals are coming to the conclusion that these crises can only be endured-that companies can't defend against every blow, and need to learn, instead, to roll with the punches.

Which is where reputational resilience-a term that has come into vogue over the past few years-comes in.

Danny Franklin, a partner at Bully Pulpit explains:“You're going to get hit. Everybody's going to get hit. People are going to say negative things about you. Customers are going to be upset. Negative reviews are going to come. They may become viral for reasons that you cannot understand.

“And so I think that the focus on resilience as opposed to defense is based in the understanding, and I think it's a correct one, that you're going to have a few bad days in this business, and what matters isn't necessarily whether they happen or not, but how quickly you're able to come back, and how much people give you the benefit of the doubt so that they will listen to the story that you have to tell.”

Working with clients as they sought to manage a plethora a crises prompted another related insight, Franklin says.

“We've been working on the issue of misinformation in the political arena for five, six years now, on things like vaccines and climate, and then increasingly with corporate clients who are getting caught with social media driven boycotts, often literally things made up out of whole cloth that are costing them hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.”

And one of the things that became apparent, he said, was that vulnerabilities differed appreciably from company to company, even between companies that appeared-on the surface, at least-to have very similar profiles, and even similar levels of trust among key stakeholder groups.

“I think the traditional thinking on corporate reputation is very monolithic,” said Franklin.“So you want to be trusted, trusted to do the right thing. But that misses a lot of the nuance that you can be trusted in general, but vulnerable to some specific aspects that get to specific weaknesses in your reputation.

“We wanted to try to get the general sense of what it means for a company to be resilient to misinformation or negative narratives.”

So Bully Pulpit created a survey that sought to understand what makes some companies more vulnerable to misinformation, and others more resilient. It conducted a survey of 8,000 US adults, and 2,500 each in the UK, France, and Germany, testing 46 attacks against 171 companies.

“We tested a series of common potential negative narratives, things like an executive getting involved in a tax issue or something involving DEI or being involved in a foreign conflict, a product creating health risk, different things that we've seen come up over the last several years.

“We asked, one, whether you would believe in it, if you read about it, and then two, what impact it would have on their reputation, how much worse it would make you feel about them if you heard about it.”

For example, survey respondents said they trusted two similar automakers equally-68% trusted both of them to do the right thing. But when respondents were asked about specific allegations, they were significantly more inclined to believe the accusations against one of them. Specifically:

• Respondents were 38% more likely to believe that Company B used deceptive language in contracts;
• They were 34% more likely to believe Company B tolerated harassment in the workplace;
• They were 23% more likely to believe Company B engaged in anti-competitive practices;
• And they were 11% more likely to believe Company B deliberately misreported pollution levels.

Overall, Company A ranked in the 70^th percentile of all companies in the survey when it came to reputational resilience, while Company B ranked in the 22^nd percentile-1.7 times as vulnerable to misinformation-despite their superficially similar trust levels.

So how did the two companies differ? The researchers tested a variety of reputational drivers, from the quality of the company's products to its embrace of continuous improvement; from its positive impact on the community to its commitment to ESG and DEI; from its willingness to take a stand on political issues to leadership that values integrity.

There were some differences from market to market. In the US, for example, employee well-being is a critical component of reputational resilience, while in France and Germany a commitment to sustainability is important. But across all four markets, organizational leadership was the single most important factors.

“The most powerful predictors get back to some direct relationship that people have with a brand,” says Franklin.“The ones that we saw being really powerful are first having leadership that cares about something other than just profit, being a company that is led by values, a real sense of your purpose as a company.”

Also important were attributes related to product quality and willingness to improve products constantly; to employee well-being, such as offering good pay and benefits; and“the impact that you're having on communities, creating jobs that strengthen the community,” says Franklin.

“The things that have less of an impact are things that a lot of companies have maybe put more weight on in their communications. So caring about the environment, sustainability metrics, not as important to this specific thing. I'm not saying it's not important-there's lots of reasons it's important-but it's not going to make someone feel like it could give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Of course, many companies invest significant resources in executive positioning and in communicating their values. But not all do so effectively, Franklin says.“I think the number of companies that communicate in ways that penetrate and get to the audiences they need to are much, much fewer. I think a lot of brands are maybe a bit too diffuse in how they're communicating and they're telling too many stories and not the stories that really matter.

“And I think a lot of companies get caught up in crises and don't use those crises to tell a positive story and recover as quickly as possible.”

One thing that has not changed, he says, is that companies need to have invested in the attributes of resilience before a crisis strikes.“The relationship you have with customers, the relationships you have with the community, the relationships you have with employees, those are things that you have to invest in all the time.

“It can be the difference between whether you're going to be dealing with something for a week, or a month, or 10 years. The brands that have been dealing with issues for 10 years, it's not because they responded badly in the days after the crisis. It's because they didn't prepare their reputation in the years before the crisis hit.”

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