In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney argues that, in the current economy, “the price of everything is becoming the value of everything”.

Extending this theory: if you can’t measure something, it is therefore of less value to an organisation than something that is quantifiable.

Herein lies the challenge of understanding your organisation’s reputation.

Reputation is an intangible asset. It’s not a product you can touch, it cannot be measured or isolated in a balance sheet, and there are many ways to interpret its value to an organisation.

But, reputation also appreciates in parallel with the growth and development of your organisation. Investing in your reputation in the same way you would invest in a tangible asset provides complementary returns.

The stronger your reputation, the greater flexibility you’ll have to take advantage of opportunities and to weather challenges.

Building reputation

Your reputation is the way others perceive you as a result of your actions and your external and internal communications.

The strongest reputations are built when the actions of an organisation reflect the manner in which the organisation presents itself externally and how it treats its people.

Like any form of construction, building reputation cannot happen quickly, nor in silos. Rather, it requires consistency over time.

Your reputation needs to align with your values, your brand and your delivery. Each piece of the reputation building block then strengthens it, creating resilience for future challenges.

Maintaining and enhancing reputation

Maintaining and enhancing reputation generally focuses on your positioning; the way in which an organisation engages and communicates with its stakeholders - be it customers or clients, government, staff, investors or the general public, as well as delivering on your core business promise.

It is also about the day-to-day activities that support your organisation’s investment spent building your reputation, and which complements the proactive work you undertake to enhance or protect your reputation.

It’s about ensuring that staff demonstrate the values of the organisation and external stakeholders understand who you are what you stand for.

It can’t just be about saying the right things – you have to live up to them. Preparing a well-considered communications plan, to be implemented alongside your operations, is critical.

At a tactical level, reputation maintenance and enhancement is everything from speaking at a conference, to media and PR, to internal communications, to correspondence to customers, to marketing activities.

Whatever the tactics utilised, they need to be delivered in a consistent and creative manner and align with your organisation’s overarching objective and narrative.

Managing reputation

A well-managed reputation can be leveraged to assist with organisation-wide growth, and it can be utilised as a buffer when responding to issues or crisis.

Reputation can only be utilised and leveraged if it is understood.

As part of this understanding, York Park Group works with clients to complete annual reputation reviews where, through quantitative and qualitative research, we help organisations understand how they are perceived in their sector and benchmark them against key competitors or similar companies.

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently." – Warren Buffet