Reputare Consulting helps organizations understand the risks to their reputation so they can anticipate and mitigate the issues and events that undermine their business goals. And build a platform for trust and engagement with stakeholders.

Resilient organizations are increasingly focused on reputation as a key driver of business value. Like any other asset, reputation is subject to risk. But contrary to traditional assumptions, reputation risk can be measured, predicted and prevented.

Reputare Consulting understands reputation risk

Reputare Consulting was founded to help companies understand their reputation, its value and the risks that undermine it. The firm works with companies to develop strategies that protect against reputation risks and build reputation capital in a volatile environment.

The firm’s consultants have experience across industry sectors, primarily serving multinational companies that face unexpected crises, regulatory pressures or outraged stakeholders – all reputation risks that can threaten a company’s revenues and its freedom to operate as it desires.

The firm’s consultants have helped:

• A financial services company identify opportunities and risks in the planned launch of a program directed to the unbanked, including the identification of influential stakeholders for outreach and messaging, and priority geographies that offered the best environment for the product.
• A biotech company quantify the impact of company-sponsored litigation on its reputation among important stakeholder groups.
• An energy company determine how changes in the public dialogue threatened its corporate brand value during a significant crisis not of its own making.
• A defense contractor analyze the role of ethics in its reputation in countries where public opinion could influence the success of its expansion plans.
• An animal nutrition company find opportunities for community engagement that aligned with and advanced its business objectives.

by Linda Locke
March 2012

Careers in reputation management, public relations and corporate communications can be made or broken during times of crises. Communications practitioners who want more than a seat at the press-release end of the table should consider expanding their knowledge beyond communications to incorporate an understanding of the theory and research around risk communications.

A compelling case for risk literacy among the profession is made in a soon-to-be-published paper by Dr. Chris Galloway, Swinburne University, Melbourne. Galloway’s paper suggests that risk communications expertise could be one of the most important contributions a PR practitioner can offer to an employer.
The core of his paper is that “risk managers often fail to communicate effectively” while PR practitioners (and their academic theorists) fail to understand and embrace research about risk effectively.

Galloway describes risk-literate practitioners as those who pay attention to emerging risks and perceptions that are at the root of the issue. He posits the idea that if a crisis is a risk manifest, and the profession claims both crisis communications and management as core competencies, “then we do ourselves and our clients a disservice if we fail to pay sufficient attention to risk as the antecedent condition to crisis.”

Risk communication is a field that is based on persuasiveness, Galloway says, that seeks “not only to inform but also to elicit action,” a primary goal of PR practitioners.
Risk is typically part of the portfolio of finance, audit or even operations. And, the end goal of the efforts of enterprise risk management (ERM) is typically a focus on managing revenue.

The challenge, and missed opportunity, is to align ERM and PR/reputation management with a risk focus that is also oriented toward managing reputation as a bottom-line goal.

The urgency for such thinking is high because the context in which most organizations exist is defined by risk. Yet academics conducting risk communication research may provide meaningful direction for practitioners with issues such as message design (for example, are words or numbers more relevant in messaging that seeks to change behaviour through understanding?).

The benefit to PR practitioners in expanding their knowledge base is that they are “capable of exercising a wider mandate than merely reactive communication,” Galloway suggests.  In a crisis stakeholders want to know about the issue driving the situation but also what risk managers are doing to mitigate impact. If stakeholders don’t get enough information about the risk emotions may grow and shift negative.

An organization that is defined by high risk expects its communications and risk managers to identify risk before or as it emerges, and to develop strategies to mitigate before full-on outrage is expressed against the company. Full-scale outrage is likely to result in regulatory, legislative or litigatory reaction. Thus, it is in the best interests of the PR practitioner to identify tools and means of understanding outrage (as well as the lesser emotions) inherent in public attitudes about issues attached to or influenced by a company’s business goals.

In the modern, connected world, PR must accept “that citizens are more than mere message targets: they can assume active participant positions in risk policy-making.”
Galloway’s article, “Developing risk-literate public relations: threats and opportunities” will be published in July 2012 in the Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal. An advance copy is available at www.reputareconsulting.com.