Ipsos Global Reputation Centre Point of View Your Stakeholders and Your Reputation
2 Ipsos Global Reputation Centre Your Stakeholders and Your Reputation Measuring Stakeholders Why is measuring stakeholders important? Research is about asking relevant questions to relevant people. In the context of corporate reputation, it is critically important to identify the right audience(s): the stakeholder groups whose views can really make a difference to the prosperity of the organisation. Good business leaders know that reputation affects the bottom line. It may be difficult to quantify, but your company s reputation with stakeholders influences: Consumers desire to buy your products and/or services The efficiency of your marketing spend The credibility of your communications Employees pride in working for you Investors confidence to invest in you Legislators inclination to help or hinder you Journalists disposition to report positively or negatively about you NGOs propensity to work with or against you People s willingness to hear your side of the story But,you can t just say you have a good reputation Imagine someone you don t know says trust me, I have a good reputation. What s the first thing you think? It s pretty safe to say that most people would react with scepticism if not cynicism. This is because a good reputation is a trustmark that needs to be earned, not just asserted. What you do and what you say drives your reputation, but ultimately reputation depends more on what others think and say about you than what you think and say about yourself. While good behaviour and communication in a clear and consistent way provides an individual or an organization with integrity, it does not necessarily ensure a good reputation. Reputation depends on a third variable that is beyond your direct control: your stakeholders. What they think and say about you transforms integrity into good reputation. In the famous words of Jeff Bezos, Chairman and CEO of Amazon.com, Reputation is what people say about you once you ve left the room.
3 Ipsos Global Reputation Centre Your Stakeholders and Your Reputation How reputation works We have designed a model of corporate reputation that takes into account factors within your direct control and factors that you can influence only indirectly. The four building blocks of reputation within your company s direct control are your values, strategies, behaviours, and communications. When these core building blocks of reputation are aligned, you are well placed to build a strong reputation, because your company is operating with integrity. Encasing these building blocks of reputation is an ever-changing cloud of business, industry, social, and environmental issues that impact on your company. These issues, which are outside of your direct control, push and pull on your business in different ways tending to distort the alignment of your reputational building blocks and compromise the integrity of your organization. Lastly, stakeholders interact with your organization through this cloud of changing issues. They appraise the extent to which your organization successfully resists the distorting pressure raised by industry, social, and environmental issues. Their verdict determines whether or not your organization s efforts to retain integrity translate into good corporate reputation or not. The core components
4 Ipsos Global Reputation Centre Your Stakeholders and Your Reputation Local community Employees Suppliers Your reputation Elected government officials Consumers NGOs Media Financial community Captains of industry Who are stakeholders? At its most basic level, stakeholders are people who matter to your organization. Typically, these might include customers, investors, employees, government, NGOs, media, suppliers, local communities, and many more audiences. In the end, it is these people who pass judgment on the reputation of your organization and who determine its success or failure. Of course, different stakeholder groups possess different levels of influence on your organization. The mix of stakeholders that are important to your business may be quite different from that of other businesses. For example, environmental NGOs, politicians and regulatory bodies are likely to be more important to energy and petro-chemical companies than to retailers who may be more concerned with the perceptions of consumers and the media.
5 Ipsos Global Reputation Centre Your Stakeholders and Your Reputation Ipsos stakeholder audits Ipsos can help you identify and prioritize the stakeholders that are most important to your organization. Our stakeholder audits help you to define a stakeholder matrix for your organization and understand the attitudes of different stakeholder groups toward your industry and your business. Because we regularly conduct stakeholder audits for clients across a vast array of industries and geographies, we have developed the experience necessary to access all kinds of key stakeholder groups, many of whom are opinion leaders that are extremely difficult to reach. Advocacy Advocates endorse your reputation and help to pull others up the reputation pyramid Trust Favorability Familiarity Awareness Trust is built by consistently delivering on your promises In general, familiarity breeds favorability Familiarity is the bedrock of reputation Without awareness there is no reputation Building a strong reputation helps an organization perform more effectively in the present and builds a reservoir of goodwill to draw upon in future crises. We do not believe in a one size fits all approach to managing stakeholder relationships. Our stakeholder audits are tailored to the needs of each client, but tend to include a core set of questions based on the Ipsos Reputation Pyramid. This pyramid represents a consistent model for comparing the attitudes of often very different stakeholder groups. It shows different levels of stakeholder engagement with your organization. Moving stakeholders up the pyramid tends to strengthen corporate reputation and make it more resilient when challenges and difficulties arise. Engaging with stakeholders is the best way to influence their attitudes toward you and foster an environment in which a strong reputation can develop. Our stakeholder audits can help you determine the effectiveness of your stakeholder engagement relative to competitors and identify areas where this engagement needs to be improved. Our aim is to help clients build more resilient reputations through stronger relationships with the people who matter to them. Ipsos Public Affairs conducts a range of elite or stakeholder opinion research for our clients all over the world. Based on our experience, we have formulated an approach to stakeholder research that pairs our experience with a proven methodology to provide a comparable base of elites across geographies.
6 Ipsos Global Reputation Centre Your Stakeholders and Your Reputation First of all, we work closely with our clients to define the opinion elites for the research. Our general recommendation is to include both organizations that have a direct impact on the business or activities of the client as well as those who have an indirect impact. Our approach is to look ahead to times of crisis. During times of crisis, organizations and individuals who had a tangential relationship in the past often take on a more central role. Therefore, it is important to understand your reputation and issues within the larger context in which you operate. Working with our clients local teams, we develop sample frames for each country. These sample frames are evaluated and approved by in-country contacts. Our goal is to provide a frame that reflects the local balance of power while providing a comparable base to all other countries in the study. The individuals targeted by this type of quantitative surveys are generally Tier 2 elites. Tier 2 elites are people who have an impact on what top decision makers think about an organization s issues. Targeting the study at Tier 2 elites has both a practical and a theoretical component. Practically, we target Tier 2 elites because Tier 1 elites are often unwilling to complete a lengthy quantitative interview if a Tier 1 elite is going to participate in an interview, they generally expect the give-and-take of a qualitative study. While we are fortunate enough to occasionally capture the opinions of Tier 1 elites in a quantitative study, our primary target is Tier 2 elites. Theoretically, Tier 2 elites are typically the experts on particular issues in their office. Tier 1 elites are generally too busy dealing with political or management issues and they rely on their Tier 2 advisors for expertise and advice. For these studies, we capture the attitudes of those who are the most knowledgeable and to whom the decision makers turn for advice. We generally segment opinion elites/stakeholders along the following lines: Functionally by organization or institution (i.e. executive government, legislative government, NGOs, business, experts, media, etc.). Expertise or different areas of specialty (i.e. health experts, environmental experts, etc). Influence using title to segment into Tier 2A and Tier 2B with more senior titles falling into Tier 2A. The type of stakeholders or elites that we survey varies by country within the Tier 2 definition. Generally in government, we interview respondents who are senior civil servants as well as any politically appointed officials. In the legislative branch, we interview chiefs of staff, deputy chiefs of staff, directors, advisors, and analysts. In the non-governmental organizations, we interview executive directors, advocacy group leaders or PAC directors, policy experts, partners in law firms, and academics or professors. In order to ensure a reliable representation of these populations, we generally recommend a telephone or faceto-face interviewing methodology, whichever is most appropriate on a per country basis. We build our actual sample list through business samples, samples developed through in-depth desk research and access to other databases that can identify high-level individuals in spheres such as government and the media. Our experience indicates that incentives are helpful to boost response rates and secure participation. Ideally, our suggestion is to offer a summary report of a sub-set of the study s findings as an incentive, as opposed to a monetary or gift incentive. A report on topics of interest to elites from the survey (without divulging proprietary information) allows respondents to get feedback on issues important to them from a group of peers, allows our clients to provide their point of view, is worth more to these individuals than a nominal monetary incentive, and allows us to avoid problems with conflict-of-interest rules.
7 Ipsos Global Reputation Centre Your Stakeholders and Your Reputation We have conducted stakeholder/elite studies in each of the following countries: Americas Asia/Pacific Africa Europe/Middle East Argentina Australia Algeria Belgium Norway Brazil China Egypt Czech Republic Poland Canada Hong Kong Ghana Denmark Portugal Columbia India Kenya France Russia Costa Rica Indonesia Morocco Germany Turkey Chile Japan Nigeria Hungary Spain Mexico Korea South Africa Ireland Sweden US Malaysia Tanzania Israel UAE Venezuela New Zealand Tunisia Italy UK Philippines Uganda Netherlands Singapore Thailand Taiwan Vietnam About the Ipsos Global Reputation Centre The Ipsos Global Reputation Centre helps its clients to identify the issues and actions that build corporate reputation and deliver corporate brand equity. Together with our clients we identify and engage with their key stakeholders including customers and employees as well as influencers such as government and the media individuals that can impact business performance, license to operate and market competitiveness. www.ipsos.com Ipsos Global Reputation Centre 1 1-0 6-2 2