University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Corporate Reputation
Book

Corporate Reputation

12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation

Leslie Gaines-Ross
Wiley, 2008
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Image makes up some 63% of the value of most corporations. This raises the soft practice of building and maintaining a company’s reputation to the level of an executive concern. Author Leslie Gaines-Ross provides a solid education about strategies for developing, sustaining and repairing corporate reputations. While she does not significantly advance the field with sharp new insights, she does offer more recent, pertinent research. She also buttresses her findings with useful case studies. getAbstract recommends this solid overview of an important topic to corporate marketing and public-relations students and specialists.

Summary

The Science of Reputation

During the 1990s, corporate leaders began to develop a stronger interest in their companies’ reputations in the marketplace. The boom and bust of Internet companies generated new forces pulling investors, customers and other stakeholders to take a greater interest in corporate reputation. Investors found that blind faith in a company’s claims about its reputation could be punishing. The failure of Enron and its ilk showed that corporations and CEOs could lose their positive reputations overnight.

A Weber Shandwick study found that 63% of a corporation’s market value is attributable to its reputation. Another study showed that over both one-year and five-year periods, companies with positive reputations posted investment returns that were 6% higher than the S&P 500 Index. In addition to the demonstrable financial benefits of a good reputation, well-regarded companies have more recruiting success and greater positive visibility. In this light, corporate reputation management has assumed greater importance.

When a corporation’s reputation breaks down, overcoming the negative impact takes almost four years, and earning back high public...

About the Author

Leslie Gaines-Ross is “chief reputation strategist” at a global public-relations firm. She is the architect behind leading research in CEO and corporate reputation, and is the former communications and marketing director for Fortune. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, Fortune, Business Week, the Times of London, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.

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