People who Matter: Knowing and Monitoring Your Stakeholders

Research is about asking relevant questions to relevant people.  In the context of corporate reputation, nothing is more important than identifying the right audience(s):  the stakeholder groups whose views really make a difference to the prosperity of the organisation.

Good business leaders know that reputation affects the bottom line.   Your company’s reputation with stakeholders influences all aspects of the business, from your consumers’ desire to buy your products and services, your employees’ pride in working for you, your investors’ confidence to invest in you, legislators’ inclination to help or hinder you and other influential people’s willingness to hear your side of the story.

But you can’t just say you have a good reputation.  Imagine someone you don’t know says, “Trust me – I have a good reputation.”  What’s the first thing you think?  It’s pretty safe to say that most people would react with scepticism if not cynicism.  This is because a good reputation is a trustmark that needs to be earned, not just asserted.

What you do and what you say drives your reputation, but ultimately reputation depends as much on what others think and say about you.  While behaving well and communicating in a clear and consistent way are necessary conditions for a good reputation, they do not generate one.  Reputation depends on a third variable that is beyond your direct control: your stakeholders.  What they think and say about you transforms integrity into a good reputation.  As Jeff Bezos (Chairman and CEO of Amazon.com) famously said, “Reputation is what people say about you when you’ve left the room.”

How reputation works
We have designed a model of corporate reputation that takes into account factors within your direct control and factors that you can influence only indirectly.
 

 
The four building blocks of reputation within your company’s direct control are your values, strategy, behaviour and communications.  When these core building blocks of reputation are aligned, you are well-placed to build a strong reputation, because your company is operating with integrity.  Encasing these building blocks of reputation is an ever-changing cloud of issues that impact on your company – which could relate to your business, your industry sector, or wider economic, social and environmental factors.  These issues, outside of your direct control, push and pull on your business in different ways, and if your response is inadequate or inappropriate, they can distort the alignment of your reputational building blocks and compromise the integrity of your organisation.  Lastly, stakeholders interact with your organisation – and with each other - through this cloud of changing issues.  They appraise the extent to which your organisation successfully resists the distorting pressure raised by the issues affecting it.  Their verdict determines whether or not your organisation’s efforts to retain integrity translate into good corporate reputation or not.
 
Measuring your reputation with stakeholders
In seeking to manage your organisation’s reputation among your relevant stakeholders, it is of course vital to have reliable measures tracking their views.  In our long-standing experience in this area, we have found a number of key success factors for effective opinion research on corporate reputation:

• Prioritise your stakeholders and think about the key issues or KPIs that you will need to measure.  Engage other parts of the business close to the stakeholders you are researching and involve local managers in the relevant markets – the earlier in the process the better!
• Get an impartial perspective and a confidential process which truly reflects what your stakeholders think about your organisation (not just what they want you to hear)
• There is no one-size-fits-all approach – ensure you are using the most appropriate methodologies for different audiences in different markets – remember that how the research is conducted will reflect on your organisation
• Probably most importantly – plan for the action arising from the research, and feedback to your stakeholders what you have done as a result of their comments
  

We have developed a consistent framework, the Ipsos Reputation Pyramid, for comparing the attitudes of often very different stakeholder groups.  It shows different levels of stakeholder engagement with your organisation.  Moving stakeholders up the pyramid tends to strengthen corporate reputation and make it resilient when challenges and difficulties arise.

 
Engaging with stakeholders is the best way to influence their attitudes toward you and foster an environment in which a strong reputation can develop.  Stakeholder research can help you determine the effectiveness of your stakeholder engagement relative to competitors and identify areas where this engagement needs to be improved.  Our aim is to help clients build stronger relationships with the people who matter to them – so that you can convert your organisation’s integrity into a first-class and resilient reputation.
For more information, please contact: david.racadio@ipsos-mori.com