Reputation and the role of public relations
By Ashwani Singla, Chief Executive Officer, Genesis Burson-Marsteller

Walking the talk and talking the walk. Building corporate reputation is not about publicity, it’s about letting your good work speak for itself and engaging your stakeholders in a meaningful conversation.

When it comes to building and maintaining reputation, there is only one rule of thumb: let your work speak for itself. In other words, behave the way you want the world to perceive you.

No amount of spin doctoring can substitute for this basic truth. As the old saying goes, you can fool some people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Nowhere is this more relevant than in the corporate world. We have the recent rash of corporate scandals to remind us that talking up a company’s performance is not the same as actually walking that talk. Shareholder returns can scarcely be an alibi for stakeholder perceptions.

Of course, building a corporate reputation is a complex and sensitive business, not least because it involves a wide range of stakeholders — from employees and shareholders to consumers and suppliers. Each of these communities has widely differing perspectives, both individually and as a group.

That makes it inadvisable to take a one-dimensional approach to reputation-building. To make your message effective, it might make more sense to identify the stakeholders that are most important to you and focus on them.
Focusing on your core stakeholders does not, however, mean delivering propaganda of carefully crafted ‘good’ news. Public relations is not about publicity.

Public relations, in the true sense of the term, is a “conversation” or dialogue between a corporation and its core stakeholders based on trust and understanding. The role of public relations is essentially to “decode” the behaviour of corporations and create a platform for effective conversations with stakeholders. Public relations is not about image management, it is about building enduring and meaningful relationships.

Importantly, however, public relations can only be a conversation based on action. To understand this, scan the advertisements in the newspaper on any given day. Ask yourself, how many of those enticing promises do you believe? Which of those companies would you truly feel could be a trusted partner?
These questions beg another question: what creates trust? It isn’t size, for sure. I can draw up a list of the top companies in terms of market cap and there’ll be many that won’t necessarily inspire trust. Size is just one — and not necessarily a vital — dimension of corporate reputation.

In fact, if you run an eye down the list of annual rankings of India’s most respected companies, you’ll find Infosys a regular leader. What is it about Infosys that inspires respect? There are any number of reasons, from responsible leadership behaviour to best employee practices. That’s what keeps it winning year after year.

To date, the best example of genuine reputation-building still remains the handling of the Tylenol crisis in 1982. Faced with accusations of cyanide poisoning in one of its best-selling products — the painkiller Tylenol — the management of Johnson & Johnson did not hesitate to put customer safety ahead of profit, pulling the product from the shelves and warning consumers not to buy it. This even though investigations revealed a case of deliberate, localised tampering.

Later, Johnson & Johnson partnered with law enforcement agencies to investigate the crime and even opened its facilities to journalists for inspection.

The Tylenol crisis remains one of the best examples of how ethical management behaviour can enhance a company’s reputation. “Johnson & Johnson has effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle a disaster,” said an article in The Washington Post, a few months after the crisis.

As the article also pointed out, Johnson & Johnson could just as easily have disclaimed all responsibility between Tylenol and the deaths. “The company never attempted to do anything, other than try to get to the bottom of the deaths,” the article commented.

What is the communication lesson we learn from this? Simply this: there is no substitute for honesty and transparency in corporate behaviour. No amount of slick communication strategies can ever allay consumer mistrust or substitute for lack of managerial integrity.

It doesn’t need a rocket scientist to figure out that this basic truth is more relevant than ever in today’s world, where global flows of information are imposing acute pressures on corporate reputation.

That is why, as Harold Burson has frequently pointed out, public relations professionals need to increasingly act as conscience-keepers to the companies they represent. Corporations in the West have understood this. For many, public relations executives now find board-level representation.
Ultimately, the role of public relations must evolve from advising companies on what to say, to counselling them on what to do. Having said that, I can predict plenty of testy arguments in the C-suite as client briefs are challenged in the interest of stakeholder perceptions.

But whoever said building a good reputation was easy.