Reputation for growth – a three-act play

March 2021 | EXPERT BRIEFING | BOARDROOM INTELLIGENCE

financierworldwide.com

Most companies have done some impressive, and in some cases, heroic things during the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. And they have been quiet about it, especially in a world without much proactive communications and a need to focus on retention over new customer acquisition.

In 2021, they are going to need get back to focusing on growth – ideally using the results of those 2020 efforts to drive top-line sales. As the pandemic and its economic fallout continue, 2021 will bring home a need to achieve growth with tighter budgets, in a world that is very different from 2019.

After years of scepticism, even chief financial officers accept that reputation is important, its impact on market cap, undeniable. More importantly, customers care even more than shareholders about the companies behind the products they buy. But managing corporate perceptions for growth is a new way of thinking for most companies. In part due to the baggage of the term, the discipline of reputation management is often seen as defensive – risk mitigation or even crisis management – but if corporate perception (i.e., reputation) truly matters to customers, that means it can also be leveraged to drive growth. Doing this is not something many leaders have figured out, but if the money has already been spent (e.g., converting manufacturing lines to produce hand sanitiser or masks or personal protective equipment), should they not find a way to inform those customers?

Companies are equipped to talk about their products – it is what their marketing and sales organisations do for a living – but they are often ill-equipped to communicate about their company. In fact, the parts of the enterprise that are equipped to tell corporate stories – corporate communications and external affairs – spend very little time working with customer-facing functions. This disconnect between messenger and message, amid often rigid corporate silos, makes answering some simple questions rather difficult. What do customers care about? For a type of action or corporate response, what is the right way to talk about it? What is the right channel to get that message out? Will putting that message through that channel impact the business in a tangible way?

There is a way to rise to the challenge, to answer the above questions and build the capability to leverage ‘good company’ actions for growth. And there is definitely a way to integrate a positive corporate narrative into commercial messaging so that it delivers sales growth. As with any change, it is helpful to leverage a process that educates and involves key partners from across the enterprise. In the immortal words of The Bard, “the play’s the thing”, so here are the three Acts of the 2021 ‘Growth Play’.

Act 1 – leverage data. There will be scepticism at first, so it will be imperative to make a quantitative business case for even trying to find a way to drive corporate perceptions in addition to product ones. Customer research that goes beyond your products and your customer satisfaction will be necessary (in brief – new or existing custom reputation research). From this, advanced analytics can quantitatively connect perceptions of the company to commercial behaviours. The final scene of this Act should conclude with a proof point like “80 percent of our net promoter score is driven by company perceptions”.

Act 2 – partner with sales. While the first Act likely took place within a corporate function like communications, this Act will need to take place inside a commercial, market-facing part of the company. Typically, there will be a business unit leader who is looking for an edge and is willing to try something new. This partnership is critical as the Act 1 analysis will likely also indicate that these types of corporate messages will have the most impact if delivered by sales and service people directly to customers. The recurrent themes of this Act will be ‘collaboration’ and ‘integration’ – this cannot be something that corporate simply hands to the sales team for execution as a standalone campaign. Building on existing sales messaging that works, this new message must be a commercial ‘script’ that naturally integrates product and company messages for delivery via marketing channels and human interaction.

Act 3 – prove it. Now that the messaging is ready to use, the same partnership that developed it must test it in-market. Select a subset of the business and pilot the new script (e.g., train a handful of salespeople to use it), while capturing key sales performance metrics from those using it. In parallel, it is critical that you also track a control market using the “old script”, so that you can deliver concluding lines like “test market is up 12 percent in sales volume over three months vs. comparable markets”.

Putting on this entire play for senior management will both make the case and pave the way for commercialising all those great things the company did in 2020. More importantly, in a world where corporate reputation matters more every day, this play will set the stage for many similar ones to follow.

Anthony Johndrow is co-founder and chief executive of Reputation Economy Advisors. He can be contacted on +1 (917) 514 4077 or by email: anthony@repecon.com.

Anthony Johndrow

Reputation Economy Advisors