What's Your Reputation Worth?

Putting a price on complacence

Mismanaging your reputation is almost guaranteed to cost big bucks, yet even multi-billion dollar organizations tend to gloss over this crucial part of crisis management.

The main reason corporate execs offer is that they believe the results of an investment in reputation management "can't be quantified". Well, here's some quantification for you, from an article by Issue Outcomes' Tony Jacques titled, "When Share Price Puts a Value on Brand Reputation:"

Cause and effect is sometimes hard to assess when it comes to the share market, but the cost of mismanagement can be brutal. For example, Google has long been one of the world's most valuable brands (ranked fourth in the latest Interbrand rankings), and earlier this year new CEO Larry Page was expected to explain to an analyst's conference why quarterly revenue was well under forecast. Instead the CEO spoke less than 400 words of general optimism, then signed off. Wall Street hammered the stock, wiping $US15 billion off the value of Google in a single day.  

How much would it have cost Google to bring in one reputation management expert and one media trainer the weekend before the conference? The highest paid in the world wouldn't have made a scratch compared to the $15 billion loss the weak presentation caused.

Quantified? I think so.

The BCM Blogging Team
http://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/