Companies invest considerable resources in being liked, respected, and trusted. These are worthy ambitions, but on their own they may not offer companies sufficient specificity to build a proactive corporate reputation plan. They don’t answer the question of what a company should actually do.

Reservoir’s value model begins with a practical question: How does your company create value for the people whose decisions matter to its success?

Brand and reputation are often used interchangeably. A brand encompasses a broad range of associations, both cognitive and emotional. Reputation is more specifically what people think of your company based on their understanding of its conduct and contributions.

That distinction matters because reputation programs are often built around broad goals like increasing trust, without defining what a company needs to do to earn it.

Understanding what stakeholders value gives a company a better basis for choosing where to invest. It also makes research more useful. A company may discover that people do not recognize the benefits it delivers, or that the benefits it emphasizes matter less than management assumes. Sometimes, the company simply needs to improve what it does.

Each finding calls for a different response.

An approach rooted in value connects reputation work to business priorities. A pharmaceutical company needs to understand what patients, clinicians and those paying for care value about its work, and where they see shortcomings. Those judgments affect the company’s ability to bring treatments into use and build support for future innovation.

The challenge is to communicate consistently while recognizing that stakeholders have different priorities. Helping people manage illness might mean greater independence to a patient, better treatment options to a clinician and fewer costly complications to a payer. These benefits can support the same corporate story, with evidence that matters to each audience.

Emotional storytelling can help people understand why those benefits matter. But a strong initial response to a story does not establish a lasting change in how people view the company. Reputation is built when the company continues to demonstrate that value through its communications, its decisions and, ultimately, people’s experience with it.

That is why reputation work belongs close to the business. Much of the work involves helping people understand contributions they have overlooked or taken for granted. It also requires knowing the business well enough to recognize when performance needs to improve and being candid about what the company needs to do.

Reputation is built by creating value that matters to the people important to the success of the business, demonstrating and communicating that value consistently, and improving where the company falls short. Understanding what stakeholders value is where that work begins.

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