Reputation Management in Global 1000 Firms: A Benchmarking Study

Abstract

In December 1996, the authors designed a questionnaire survey and sent it to the Chief Executive Officers of the 1,000 largest international companies in the USA and United Kingdom. A total of 139 usable responses were returned to us in January, 1997 — a 14 per cent response rate. The questionnaires were filled out by either the CEO, or a member of the senior management team responsible for reputational matters. The responding companies were not significantly different from the larger sample in both size and reputational standing. Among the respondents were such industry leaders as American Express, BBC, Ford, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Johnson and Johnson, Royal Dutch/Shell, Sainsbury and Xerox. The purpose of the questionnaire was to examine how leading companies conceive and manage their reputation management practices. We solicited answers to questions in three categories: 1 Constituent Relationships: How leading companies relate to their constituents; the standards against which they design their practices; 2 Reputation-Building Practices: What kinds of strategies and systems leading companies rely on to build reputation and relate to their key constituents; 3 Organizational Issues: How companies organize themselves to manage reputation; do they have a reputation-building strategy, and who is responsible for it?