Hot take: reputation is overated.
At every self-important corporate communications conference, there’s always someone solemnly reminding us that “reputation is everything,” that “it takes a lifetime to build and a moment to lose,” and they’ll quote Warren Buffett to prove the point.
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
Maybe reputation meant something once. Maybe it still would if consumers — for that is what we really are — had genuine choice but let’s take a look at some of the major brands embedded in Australian life and ask: does reputation actually move the dial?
Parliamentary inquiries, senate investigations, royal commissions, mainstream media exposés and every other forum imaginable have found these organisations at various times and in various ways fundamentally deficient in basic human decency — and yet they persist.
Various aged, disability and childcare businesses. The defence forces. The horse racing industry. Online gambling. All the major banks. Miners. All the major universities, half the RTO sector, Qantas. The Catholic Church and its peers. The duopoly supermarkets. The major insurers. Throw in a good dozen or so politicians still serving. Add a dozen countries that are clear and present dangers to peace and democracy as we know it. I could go on.
All have been found — not just alleged, found — to have engaged in behaviour ranging from charging dead people fees, child abuse, industrial-scale animal cruelty, ignoring child abuse, encouraging problem gambling and drinking (with their known links to domestic violence), underpaying workers for years, illegally sacking staff, systemic bullying and sexual assault, destroying ancient Indigenous rock art, rampant privacy violations, the death of democracy, planetary destruction et al.
And that’s just off the top of my head.
“Their reputations? In the toilet. Their share prices and market dominance? In the black.”
In theory, reputational damage should have destroyed these companies but in reality, they’re still at the top of the ASX, still embedded in our daily lives, still too big, too entrenched, too well-resourced to fail. We don’t admire them like we once did — but we keep using them. Often because we have no real choice. (Tried changing a credit card lately?)
Just as often our attention is quickly focussed elsewhere and our regulators are simply too inept to act.
I nearly forgot the entire social media industry, Airbnb etc, most of the dot-com / A.I / crypto bro-verse. They persist. They prevail. They succeed.
Reputation clearly doesn’t matter the way comms professionals insist it does.
Not if you’ve cornered the market. Not if customers can’t easily leave. Not if your lobbyists have got the decisionmakers on speed dial.
If those conditions are met, you’ll be just fine — reputation be damned.