Our Blind Spot
When it comes to the reputational brand, the nature of the organizational network is paramount. Indeed, the organizational network is the reputational brand system.
We brand practitioners tend to overlook this reality despite the sometimes daunting countervailing forces operating against our otherwise sound strategies and tactics. More storytelling or sugar-coated messaging isn’t the answer when bad experiences, poor quality, or improper conduct — among other reputational injuries — loom across the organizational system.
Certainly, the topic of brand reputation has been regarded by many authors through various lenses, such as issues management, crisis response, corporate social responsibility, product quality, and brand relevance. Media have devoted special issues and considerable programming to brand reputation, typically as a data point for adjudging business performance. And a raft of consultants and agencies have developed practice areas dedicated to reputation management or its subgenres. Indeed, reputation has considerable worth as an industry all to itself.
As the proxy for organizational reputation, brand has earned at least as much attention.
Like reputation, brand can be regarded through several lenses, such as brand identity, marketing, communications, and culture, with a plethora of consultancies built to execute some or all of the brand playbook, whether for mind share, market share, or reputational gain. And that’s generally as far as most brand-related discussion goes.
Unfortunately, the literature of reputation often fails to address brand holistically as the outgrowth of an organizational system. This may be because such an effort requires admitting that much of brand performance is beyond the command of any one person or team. In the face of such discouraging truth, brand practitioners retreat to the cozy terrain of tools and tactics rather than undertake an exploration of the organization’s brand ecosystem.
Indeed, brand reputation is forged in organizational furnaces everywhere except in the offices of the brand team. If we only execute brand campaigns, craft on-brand messaging, tell brand-affirming stories, noodle inspiring brand visions, and create powerful brand imagery, we still will never tap into the larger organizational foundry of reputation.
If we only offer bromides like, “be authentic,” “live your core values,” “create a compelling vision,” “keep your promises,” and “deliver memorable experiences,” we sidestep the hard work of engineering a brand system that targets and pursues ideal brand experiences and preferred reputational outcomes.
And when it comes to the workings of operating culture, most brand strategists are virtually blind amid the productive gears of value creation. That’s understandable as brand practitioners (and especially consultants) typically work in cubes or offices remote from the frontlines and factories where the most impactful brand experiences gestate.
These same practitioners also are often oblivious to back-office operations where the speed and quality of workflow handoffs or service level competence reshape the brand’s contours through hundreds of touchpoint moments every day. And it’s the rare breed of practitioner who grasps the enormous operational dependence on information technology, automation, robotics, and expert systems and their promise-or-peril dynamic with respect to brand reputation.
To reiterate, the organizational system is the brand system. The brand system is the predominant architect of brand reputation. That said, the brand system is a fluid entity; it has multiple currents — influenced by people and operating practices — that interweave across the system’s architecture. It’s no overstatement to say that every organizational decision or action alters these currents, with corresponding downstream brand effects.
The confluence of these currents influences outcomes (brand experiences) that continuously nudge, jostle, or jolt reputation along a better/worse continuum. And most of the time brand practitioners lack the agency to do much about brand currents or consequent reputational effects beyond the image-embellishing tools of the trade.
While this seems heretical coming from someone whose career was largely in service of the brand and reputation gilding, it reflects a truth that is already well institutionalized. Just look at Fortune’s annual Most Admired Companies list, which considers nine factors in assessing reputational stature:
People management
Quality of management
Social responsibility to the community and the environment
Innovativeness
Quality of products or services
Wise use of corporate assets
Financial soundness
Long-term investment value
Effectiveness in doing business globally
There’s not much in this list that brand practitioners can legitimately claim as their work or otherwise directly influence. Clearly, the reputational criteria encompass a broad spectrum of constituents, concerns, and operational issues, most of which are beyond the ken of brand practitioners.
Certainly, we can promote, message, and campaign around these reputational standards; however, the brand system largely operates beyond the reach of the brand guru. That is, unless the guru also happens to be a main cog in the organizational machine.