Zoe Tabary: What do you think are the key ingredients to a solid corporate reputation?

Jonathan Sands, Elmwood: There are two ingredients to a solid corporate reputation: integrity and attitude. Integrity, because consumers are increasingly marketing-savvy and know when the wool is being pulled over their eyes. Attitude – or point of view – because that’s what creates an emotional connection with consumers. The late Jerry Garcia [frontman of the Grateful Dead, a band] said “It’s no longer good enough to be the best of the best.  You need to be the only people who do what you do.” While rational differences (e.g. technical product features) are fairly straightforward to copy, emotional differences are much harder to replicate.

Does a strong brand necessarily equate with a good reputation?

Absolutely not. A brand’s lie – even unintended – to its customers can stand for extremely negative things. For example, the powerful BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) brand has been severely tarnished by the Jimmy Savile scandal [in which Jimmy Savile, a former BBC television presenter, was posthumously accused of child sexual abuse over a period of 50 years].

Are you seeing a shift in the time and resources that businesses devote to their reputation?

Certainly, although they still have a long way to go. One of the great challenges we face in business is that the power of emotion, which is key to preserving a brand’s reputation, is rarely taught in education systems. As a result, boards of directors are overly technical and rational. It is much more unusual, for instance, to find a marketing director than a CFO on a company’s board. Procurement departments now have a bigger role to play than marketing directors but aren’t necessarily educated about brand design skills.

To what extent does reputation play a role in attracting talent, suppliers and investment?

It’s fundamental. In my own organisation, we enter lots of creative awards because they attract top students. This has fundamentally changed from 20 years ago – students these days apply for jobs at companies they would be proud to work for. Reputation also provides investors with a degree of safety that the business they’re investing in has longevity. The same thing applies to choosing suppliers: retailers, for example, can list and delist products, but if a store didn’t have any Coke drinks or Mars bars, it would lose customers.

Social media and mobile technologies are increasingly connecting consumers with each other. Do you think this has increased the reputational risk for businesses?

Reputation can be impacted negatively as well as positively by technology, and I don’t think organisations quite grasp that yet. YouTube’s “United breaks guitars”, a video where a frustrated customer chronicled his negative year-long attempt to win compensation from United Airlines, had a disastrous effect on their share price. But when asked what was the value of the Coke brand, the former chief executive of Coke said: “if everybody had a memory loss, we could easily manufacture our products but we’d be out of business.”