Reputation Management

Connecting reputation, purpose and stakeholder emotions

Organisations with strong reputations are better able to attract the best and most appropriate stakeholders such as customers, investors and employees, so it’s logical that organisations attach great importance to building, maintaining and protecting their corporate reputations.

This masterclass is designed to equip you with the skills and expertise needed to connect organizational reputation and purpose with the successful management of key stakeholder relationships, by putting an emphasis on the use of stories (in the form of reputational campaigns) and the role of emotions. Through practical work on living cases, this course will provide an intense and applied experience of what managing reputations in challenging, diverse and fast-changing environments requires.

The academic core of this course is a comprehensive reputation management framework that has been tested widely and is currently in use with a number of major private, public and not-for-profit sector organisations and their key stakeholder groups worldwide. You will be guided through the most relevant elements of this well-founded academic framework. The practical work will challenge participants to work as teams of consultants applying academic insights to real organizational scenarios to develop reputational campaigns building on the use of stories and organizational purpose that engage stakeholders and their emotions. A number of reputation experts provide input on the emerging case work and a panel comprised of experienced practitioners and academics will test the appeal and rigour of the newly developed reputational campaigns, providing constructive feedback during the participants’ final presentations.

Learning objective

This masterclass has three primary learning objectives:

• You are exposed to key elements of a comprehensive academic reputation management framework. The learning objective here is to unpack the various building blocks of strategic reputation management - such as causes, moderators and consequences of different reputation strategies in stakeholder relationships - in a sequential and logical manner
• Teams are working on live cases. The learning objective here is to expose you to the opportunity and challenges inherent when applying key elements of reputation and relationship management to cases happening in real-time and giving participants the opportunity to develop compelling reputational campaigns – with the final presentations to an experienced practitioner audience providing a genuine benchmark to each case work
• The study of organisational reputation and purpose is connected in this masterclass to the study of stakeholder emotions and the use of stories. The learning objective here is to allow you to develop analytical skills to judge reputation issues and key stakeholder relationships in a nuanced manner and develop proficiency in assessing situations from both an intellectual/cognitive AND emotive perspective. This enables you to navigate the reputational landscape professionally, connecting organizational stakeholders with the articulation of organizational purpose through the use of narratives plots in an emotionally grounded and engaging manner.