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Q&A

Q&A with Joachim Klewes and Robert Wreschniok, Editors of Reputation Capital: Building and Maintaining Trust in the 21st Century

When the biggest economic crisis in decades hit industries and regions around the globe in 2008, Ketchum Pleon senior counselors Joachim Klewes and Robert Wreschniok immediately recognized the accompanying crisis of confidence and the potential impact for individual companies. Their response was to gather an international team of authors to jointly develop concrete and rapid responses to the challenge of restoring trust in organizations. The result was a new book called Reputation Capital: Building and Maintaining Trust in the 21st Century (November 2009, Springer Science + Business Media), with Klewes and Wreschniok serving as editors.

Here, the co-editors talk about their goals in putting the book together and key takeaways for corporate communicators.

Perspectives: What led you to put together Reputation Capital and what did you hope the book would accomplish?

Robert Wreschniok: In our work for international companies and organizations, not a day goes by without our dealing with the topic of reputation management. So, we have felt challenged personally as consultants in reputation matters by the crisis of confidence, which has assumed ever greater dimensions since we first began work on the book. Our goal was to produce a book that would provide both theoretical insights and practical guidance.

From the beginning we had very clear ideas about the topics that had to be included in a volume on reputation management in the 21st century. It also was clear to us from the start that we would have to approach this topic not from a European, American or Asian perspective, but from a global perspective — that is, with an international group of contributors. We wanted to include perspectives from both leading scientists at major universities and practitioners from multiple highly visible industries. Owing to this international perspective and the collective work on the articles, which lasted more than a year from conception to publication, a book emerged that has exposed us as editors to new facets and interrelationships — and that we believe will expose readers to new and unconventional ideas about managing reputation.

Perspectives: What is the most important lesson or insight that you would want corporate communicators to take away from the book?

Joachim Klewes: Anyone responsible for managing organizational reputation should definitely take away the fact that a good reputation strategy has four success factors:

1. It simplifies. The strategy should support C-level decision-making processes by reducing complexity.
2. It manages risk. A solid reputation strategy identifies realistic objectives based on scenario analysis, and it recognizes that where there is no risk, there is no return.
3. It defines the ROI. A good reputation strategy clearly articulates the value proposition associated with successful strategy execution.
4. It is measurable. There should be a precise plan for determining to what extent desired ROI was achieved.

Wreschniok: We also defined "10 golden rules" for improving corporate reputation management, which is another important takeaway. The rules can be divided into five categories set out by Kathleen M. Eisenhardt and Donald N. Sull in a Harvard Business Review article, "Strategy as Simple Rules": how-to rules, boundary rules, priority rules, timing rules and exit rules.

How-to rules spell out key features of how the reputation management process should be executed.

Boundary rules focus communication managers on which actions should be pursued and which are beyond the pale.

Priority rules help communication managers rank and assess the accepted actions.

Timing rules synchronize communication managers with the pace of possible decisions for action inside the company and what's going on in the real world.

Exit rules help communication managers decide when to pull out of what they believed in yesterday.

A company that recognizes and follows our rules for reputation in each of these categories is unlikely to run into deep trouble.

Perspectives: What kind of reactions have you had to Reputation Capital since its release?

Joachim Klewes: It has been only a few months since the book has been available, but already we've received personal thank-you letters from several clients and other senior communicators, including C-level executives and heads of communication from leading international companies, who either read the book or attended our kickoff conference in Munich in November. Because of the tremendous positive response to that event, which included discussions with some of the authors as well as workshops, we are planning similar conferences in other parts of the world.

Wreschniok: The book is playing a significant role in the PR industry's professional discussion on reputation, and it is now in the process of being listed by all major scientific libraries. Readers of PR Professional, an online German PR magazine, also voted it among the 10 most important PR books so far in 2010.

Perspectives: Recent news stories have put corporate reputation in the spotlight. Are there any observations or insights you would add to Reputation Capital if you were working on the book today?

Klewes: In Reputation Capital, we describe how to build and maintain trust in the 21st century. Although there have been some serious changes to the way best practice in reputation management works in the last decades, we are quite confident that we present the "state of the art" in this field.

That said, we have since published brand new studies in Der Pressesprecher, a German trade journal for heads of communication, showing that companies may experience a reputation dip of 30 to 40 percent due to short-term crisis but are able to recover over time with proper reputation management. Also, we can show how positive and negative news have different influences on reputation. Our main conclusion is that communications managers HAVE to be included in corporate decision making to have a chance to raise objections to decisions that can lead to costly reputation damage.