Actions Speak and Pay—the Value of Reputation
You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do. - Henry Ford
Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers. -Elizabeth Arden
Corporate citizenship is not only a department in your company; it is more importantly the combination of how your company exercises its rights, privileges, obligations, and responsibilities—throughout all of its operations. What is the ecosystem of value that it creates for its stakeholders and for society?
What is derived from the combination of actions is reputation—the collective perception of those actions by others. Even before the advent of modern reputation management, savvy business people like Henry Ford and Elizabeth Arden understood the value that can be derived from how their companies were perceived. It takes years to build a good reputation. Thinking through all of the firm’s opportunities to act in ways that will build positive valuable reputation is an important responsibility of corporate citizenship professionals. A good portion of the intangible value in the companies pictured in the chart to the left can be attributed to goodwill or intellectual property, but even accounting for those assets, there is value in excess, which is attributed to brand value or reputation.
