Perspective: Reputation Is An Organizational Design Decision, Not A Communications Problem

(MENAFN- PRovoke) Reputation does not live in the communications function. It passes through it, which is why most communications functions, including many well-run ones, cannot produce durable reputation outcomes on their own.

One insight has mattered most in twenty years of this work: reputation is an organizational design problem. Treating it as a communications problem guarantees underperformance.

Start with the symptom. Ask five senior leaders in any global company to define reputation in one sentence. You will get five different answers. Then ask them who owns it. You will get five more. That is the state of the field, including inside companies with sophisticated functions and well-regarded CCOs. The confusion is not a training gap. It is a design gap.

Here is the design that works.

Brand and reputation are related but distinct functions with different owners, different metrics, and different time horizons. The chief marketing officer (CMO) owns brand. Brand is the promise the company makes, expressed through identity, creative, channels, and customer experience. The chief communications officer (CCO) owns reputation. Reputation is a belief held by those with power over the company's license to operate - regulators, ministers, activists, investors, employees, and the journalists who cover them.

Reputation is earned with them through a different mechanism than brand is earned with consumers. It is earned offstage, in meetings that do not make the news, over timelines that outlast most communications plans.

I have seen the design work. Egypt launched Meeza, a national payment scheme aimed at keeping domestic transaction revenue inside the country. Visa was not shut out. The outcome was negotiated coexistence, not displacement. That outcome came from years of financial inclusion work with the Central Bank. The effort was coordinated across communications, policy, and government affairs. It built the reputation asset behind the result. Communications did not produce the outcome on its own. Reputation, built over years, is what kept the door open.

The design has three parts. The reputation function needs its own architecture: a dedicated team, budget, metrics, and a coordinating rhythm with legal, policy, government affairs, and investor relations. Adjacent functions need explicit handoffs. Legal, government affairs, and investor relations should know when a matter turns reputational, and who leads from there. And the CEO has to back all of it.

Reputation investments are expensive, slow, and difficult to attribute. Sooner or later, a CEO will ask to cut the budget in a tough quarter. That will kill the function unless the CCO has already built the case. The real case is that reputation is the asset that determines whether the company gets the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong.

I have also seen the design fail. At another company, I was brought in to build a reputation function from scratch. The product itself was the crisis. The team was small, new, and trying to catch up to years of accumulated issues. My first discovery was that no one on the senior team could clearly articulate the difference between brand and reputation. The CMO thought she owned reputation. The CCO thought he owned brand. Legal thought both were someone else's problem. Every planning cycle moved work around without fixing the underlying confusion. Nothing I did on messaging mattered until we settled the terms and redesigned the lanes.

Here is the shortest version of the prescription.

If you are a CCO: you have to be able to explain the difference between brand and reputation instantly. One sentence for each. If you cannot, your stakeholders will not be able to either. Write the two definitions down. Walk them through legal, policy, government affairs, investor relations, and marketing. Do not accept a nod. Require alignment. Use the exercise to identify every lane where ownership is unclear, and do not leave the room until it is.

If you are a CEO: ask your CCO who gives the company the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong, and why. Reputation shows up in whether a regulator calls you for context before sending a subpoena. It shows up in whether a minister takes your meeting without preconditions. It shows up in whether a senior journalist calls for comment before publication. If the answer is vague, the reputation function is under-designed. Fix the design before the next crisis, because the next crisis will arrive before you are ready.

If you are a board member: ask the same question of the full leadership team separately. If the answers differ, you have a design problem, not a communications problem.

Brand is expression. Reputation is infrastructure. The companies that build both well do so because someone - usually the CCO with air cover from the CEO - insisted on designing the operating model to support both. Everyone else is hoping the promise and the belief will find their way to alignment on their own. They will not.

Nathaniel Sillin is a senior director of global corporate communications and public affairs at Gilead Sciences, with more than 20 years of experience leading reputation, crisis, and issues communications. He has previously held roles at Visa and Edelman.

Note: This article reflects the views of the author and is published as part of PRovoke Media's opinion section. It does not necessarily represent the views of PRovoke Media or its editorial team. We welcome a range of perspectives and invite readers to submit thoughtful responses or counterpoints for consideration to [email protected].

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