Only 41% of organisations actively measure their corporate reputation. It begs the question whether the other 60% are confident enough about their corporate reputation not to measure it, measure it in an ad-hoc way or simply don’t care?
 
Where it is measured, the most popular department to have ownership is the Comms/PR department, very closely followed by no specific department being the primary owner, with everyone being involved.
 
In terms of how organisations would describe their corporate reputation 23% say excellent and 61% good. No wonder there’s no need to measure it……….
 
61% of the panel feel their organisation’s corporate reputation has improved over the last 3 years.
 
55% of organisations claim to have a corporate reputation protection strategy. Of these, the highest proportion have both a proactive and reactive strategy, with a further 5% having only a proactive strategy and 15% only a reactive strategy.
 
If organisations were to suffer an attack on their corporate reputation the most popular areas charged with responding are Communications, 41% and the CEO 34%. Press and print media are the two most popular channels that organisations feel comfortable using when responding to an attack on their corporate reputation.
 
However it is fascinating that the next most popular is Twitter, an outlet that many people hadn’t heard of until relatively recently; yet almost half of all organisations now say they would use it under such circumstances. This number will surely only rise in years to come.
 
In terms of attacks on their corporate reputation the number one (and funnily enough quite topical) concern that organisations have is IT outages, closely followed and somewhat linked to cyber attacks. Of less concern are environmental issues, product faults & financial / share issues.
 
The most ‘popular’ areas where organisations have suffered an attack to damage their corporate reputation are product fault/ recall and employee misbehaviour. Bizarrely, the former is one of the areas where the panel is least concerned about an attack and where they least actively manage for an attack.
 
The panel feel bad corporate reputation can be most damaging in terms of brand reputation (unsurprisingly) and employee engagement levels.
 
The most popular measurement tool amongst those who measure their corporate reputation is to conduct regular surveys and assessments, followed by the same method but on an occasional basis.

For the full report, please contact David Clark