Get Emotional: A View on Character and Reputation

Businesses today struggle with immediate priorities – like growing, or even just surviving, in a challenging economy. And the speed of communications and evolving cultural dynamics are creating brand new challenges. What has not changed, though, is the need for businesses to engage substantively with stakeholders. In fact, increasing transparency is increasing the demand for that substantive engagement.

But in the face of these evolving dynamics, are companies really communicating effectively? Or are character and reputation being put on the back burner?

The answer is that too many organizations have become far less attentive to the longer-term nurturing and management of character and reputation. This diminished attentiveness has yielded more reputational challenges – dilemmas posed by increased regulation, litigation, poor employee morale and strained customer relationships.

The continuing lag in consumer faith in institutions and businesses is driven as much by emotional factors as by concerns about actual performance. That’s why an appreciation of the emotional drivers that shape reputation is a key gauge of stakeholder sentiment and gives organizations actionable information. A lag in recognized character and reputation presents a clearer need for an improved corporate story – a need to engage critical audiences with an eye toward provoking the right emotional reaction to that story.

We know that character and reputation feed business performance; that they influence stakeholder attitudes. We also know that the acceleration of social media has driven demands for transparency to an all-time high.

It is critical that we think about the emotional drivers that inform character and reputation, and that are most important to a particular audience. Companies need to understand how much of their reputation is “of the moment” or the product of context in the immediate environment. That will help them separate and better understand those emotional components.

The importance of assessing the emotional components of reputation cannot be underestimated. The mainstay of understanding corporate reputation over the years has been focused on attributes in the rational dimension such as “employees put customers first” and “high quality goods/services.” But what about measuring qualities like appeal, trust and admiration. What underlies this are the perceived benefits to the audience – for example, do they feel well treated or that services provide good value for the money?

Further underpinning these perceived benefits are hidden motivations – factors which are driving a physical, social or moral need. To tap into these motivations, assessments of character and reputation must uncover the emotional dimensions behind goodwill and preference. Understanding the emotional reputation drivers – perceptions about traits such as optimism, honesty and creativity – are crucial to targeted messaging and deeper engagement.

The starting point is a fundamental set of questions that organizations struggle with when they try to assess reputation:

• Does our corporate story have clarity, and are we able to communicate our view of the world to the audiences that matter to us?
• How do we assess what our various audiences care about, especially when it comes to the vital emotional perspective that informs their views about reputation?

Asking these questions is critical. The emotional constructs to assigning reputational value reveal an understanding of the all-important component of character that we believe is vital to the equation.

It is clear that character and reputation must be analyzed and understood in three dimensions – the traditional reputational dimensions, the contextual dimensions and the emotional dimensions. When you are able to see all three together, then –and only then – will you have a complete picture. And this is the view that offers clear, actionable insights that will enable you to put character and reputation back on the front burner – where they belong.