By accelerating change and reducing cost through quality strategies, tools and approaches, reputation should be protected. However, a proactive approach to protecting quality should also be taken, especially where quality is critical to the integrity of the product or service or in other words the costs of something going wrong are very high.

Why is Protecting Reputation Important?

To many CEOs, corporate image & reputation is not something to fret about—at least, not until a crisis erupts, like a financial scandal, a major quality failure, or ecological disaster. But when a crisis happens it can wipe huge amounts off the valuation of a company.

Over the last 20 years, intangible value has grown as a percentage of total market valuation. Anywhere between 60 & 80% of a company’s valuation is now based on intangible assets.

Reputation Related Risks

• Reputation takes years to recover from failure making it harder to do business
• Perception of poor CSR will damage your reputation – consumers expect modern companies to have strong demonstrable Corporate Social Responsibility
• Reputational damage is deeper and quicker now than ever before because information, opinion, and ultimately consumer choice is affected at scale due to communication technologies

How to Start Proactively Protecting Reputation

Prevention is always better than the cure (and cheaper too!). Protecting reputation starts with understanding performance and risk so you know where you need to raise performance and mitigate against failure. To quickly understand performance and assess risk, Oakland has developed an assessment tool across 18 organisational indicators of quality. This rapidly allows an assessment and a performance and risk dashboard to be generated, so that management can make solid decisions about improvements.

To contact an expert in Protecting Reputation for immediate help or further information, please contact us or telephone: +44 (0)113 234 1944