Reputation Management vs Reputation Architecture

Reputation isn’t your shadow anymore. It’s your operating system. 

It’s no longer something you manage. It has already been decided, by AI, based on patterns inside your organization you may not even know exist. Most leaders still think about reputation the old way: crisis plans, issue management, damage control after the fact. But AI now reads every signal a company puts out and connects them across every location and every stakeholder, drawing its own conclusion about who you really are. A bad manager in one city used to stay local. Now it can become your global reputation by tomorrow morning.

There is a scale that runs from head in the sand to full reputation architect, and most organizations are stuck somewhere in the middle, reacting instead of designing. This episode gets into why reputation now functions like a credit score, why one recent report put a seven trillion dollar number on it globally, and why the real work ahead is not protecting your brand but architecting the patterns underneath it, before AI does that job for you.

Listen For

3:35 Why should organizations stop managing reputation and start architecting it?

5:13 How does reputation become operational currency across an organization?

7:48 Why is brand more than a logo or a “cowboy hat”?

10:45 How is AI becoming a stakeholder in your reputation?

16:35 How can leaders tell if they are reacting, managing, or architecting reputation?

Guest: Bonnie Caver, Reputation Lighthouse

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Transcript

Lady Emily (00:00):
Have you ever taken a shortcut, cut across the grass instead of following the sidewalk? Today on Stories and Strategies, we ask what happens when an organization builds the sidewalk before it knows which route people actually want to take and whether anyone in charge paying attention to where people are already walking.

Doug Downs (00:23):
There's a story told about universities. Maybe it happened exactly this way, maybe it happened at five different schools and kind of got sanded down into one good story. I don't know. Either way, it's a good story. A university builds new buildings. No sidewalks yet, just dirt and grass between them. The architects, they just wait. Students walk. Not where the drawings said to walk, where it actually makes sense. Straight lines, shortcuts, the way people move when nobody's watching. Well, weeks pass, trails begin to appear in the grass, worn down, undeniable, not designed, discovered. Only then do the planners pave, not where they guessed people would walk, where people already were walking. The result is a campus that feels like it was always meant to move this way because it was. The architects just had the patience to watch before they built. Now, most organizations do the opposite.

(01:23):
 They pour the sidewalk first, they decide the reputation they want, they announce it and then act surprised when nobody walks that same path. Reputation management pours concrete and hopes. Reputation architecture watches the patterns already forming inside the walls before anyone outside ever sees them and it builds from there. Today on Stories and Strategies, we ask what your organization's desire paths are already telling you and whether anyone is paying attention before someone else paves it for you.

(02:10):
 My name is Doug Downs, guest this week, someone I've been online a lot with but I've never met in person, Bonnie Caver. It's so

Bonnie Caver (02:16):
Great to see you.

Doug Downs (02:16):
You too. And

Bonnie Caver (02:17):
Live. That's the thing. We don't get to see each other live enough, so

Doug Downs (02:21):
It's wonderful

Bonnie Caver (02:21):
When we do.

Doug Downs (02:22):
Just sort of message and like your post and repost and all this. And you're from Austin.

Bonnie Caver (02:26):
I'm from Austin.

Doug Downs (02:27):
Okay. Great city. How many times have you been to Toronto? Because I'm thinking it's not your first.

Bonnie Caver (02:32):
It's my second time, I think.

Doug Downs (02:33):
Okay.

Bonnie Caver (02:34):
Yeah,

Doug Downs (02:34):
Not

Bonnie Caver (02:34):
As many times as I would like.

Doug Downs (02:36):
Okay. What are you going to do different this time? Lots of parks. I think that's the thing that stands out. We got a lot of parks.

Bonnie Caver (02:42):
I'm trying to figure out how I can live in Niagara on

Doug Downs (02:45):
The Lake. On the Lake. Yeah.

Bonnie Caver (02:46):
I've got to do a lot more with my business in order to do that.

Doug Downs (02:49):
The falls is so cool, but if you travel your Niagara on the Lake, it's such a great spot.

Bonnie Caver (02:55):
And had some wine. That's the important thing.

Doug Downs (02:57):
And some ice wine. Bonnie, you're the founder and CEO of Reputation Lighthouse, a strategic advisory firm based in Austin where you help CEOs and leadership teams navigate disruption, change management, and responsible AI implementation. You had, I thought, a killer question that you asked in one of the sessions that was kind of about reputation management, which has been around for years and years and years and years. And you said, "Is this reputation management or reputation architecture?" And right away, the tiny little one watt LED light bulb in my head went boom, boom, boom. Tell me the difference between the two.

Bonnie Caver (03:35):
Well, it's really about rethinking because for years that's what people are thinking about when they say reputation, it's about managing your reputation. It's about what are those issue management, those things that you do to make sure that your reputation is managed, the crisis plans, et cetera. And there is a place for that. But when you talk to boards and CEOs and they're talking about reputation, they're thinking a little more than that, but they don't really know how to get there. And so we are trying to, well, it's been my business for a long time to change that conversation from managing your reputation to actually architecting it. And so we even have a scale that you're kind of down here where your head's in the sand all the way to a scale of being a reputation architect. And when you're at that level, you're thinking very differently about the positive of the reputation.

(04:40):
 You're thinking about what are the things that I do that build trust with my stakeholders? What are the things that I do that build that brand equity with my stakeholders? And some people think that it just happens naturally. Some people think they can't own their reputation at all. But we really look at it as if you're doing the right things, you're building that equity and that reputation and it can be the ultimate differentiator. There's nothing else that you can do that makes people want to work for you,

Doug Downs (05:12):
That

Bonnie Caver (05:13):
Makes people want to invest in you. It makes people want to let you come into their communities. It all embeds in your reputation. But for us to sit here and say, yes, reputation is important, but not really have an idea of how we actually put our arms around it and create it. And we talk about it as reputation currency and that's when reputation becomes operational. Doesn't just sit in the comms department, doesn't just sit in the marketing brand department. It sits across the executive team. Many times chief communications officer might lead it, but you have to look at it operationally and how are you making decisions operationally to capture that currency? And I think about the currency like having a good credit score. So if you have a good credit score, you can go to the bank and say, "I want to create this new AI product." And they're like, "Everything you've ever brought to me has been great, so that's a way for us to stamp you, rubber stamp.

(06:20):
 If you're brand new, you're a startup, no one's ever heard of you, they've never heard of you as a founder. Okay. Do you

Doug Downs (06:27):
Have a house? How much equity you got? How

Bonnie Caver (06:30):
Much equity do you have? " That kind of thing. Or they may say, "Well, we'll give you money, but it's going to be at a 20% interest," or something like that. Or no money. And so it really is about that same kind of thing. If you have reputation currency, it is something that you can build your business on. It's something you can operate on. It is a form of currency for your organization. And Burson put some numbers to it this past year in

Doug Downs (06:58):
January,

Bonnie Caver (07:00):
And they said reputation is a $7 trillion business economy across the globe. Well, when they're talking about that, they're not talking about reputation management is a $7 trillion economy. They're talking about that goodwill that you have because you have a good reputation. It's like 4.78% of corporate value they have contributed to being actually around reputation. I think it's a lot more than that, but it also can be a drain. You can go up or you can go down. So we created a model, not even going to say how many years ago, that is a reputation formula for organizations. And sitting in the middle of it is brand, which is the heartbeat of your company, but not brand like

Doug Downs (07:48):
Logo.

Bonnie Caver (07:49):
Logo. We love the Seth Godin. A cowboy hat doesn't make you a cowboy. And I live in Texas and I live by that. Everybody comes to Texas and they want to buy a cowboy hat, but I actually live in the country where there are real cowboys who are roping their cows every day to get them where they want them to be, et cetera. There's a very big difference. So I love that analogy. I use that often. And most of the time when you talk to CEOs about brands, they're thinking about the cowboy hat. Do we put a nice little, does it look good? Does everybody like the logo? Are the colors right?

Doug Downs (08:26):
That's introductory. That's introductory and recognition, that's all. Is

Bonnie Caver (08:30):
Their ads going well?

Doug Downs (08:33):
That

Bonnie Caver (08:33):
Kind of thing. We talk about brand as the heartbeat of your organization and this living brand. And the living brand has connections, which are the relationships you build. It's about your culture. It's about change, how you are change resilient, and you build change within your organization. It's how you communicate. And that all working together is a heartbeat. And then it has an insulation around it. And some people, when they say insulation, well, there's where your reputation management is, and it is, but there's where your crisis management is. Yes. But it's also about making some of the right decisions about the people you hire, about how you're going to be transparent, about how you train people, how you train your customers, how you go about business. It's insulating that and making some of those right decisions and also recognizing when patterns are going astray. And so that's kind of our model and it's been our model for a long time.

(09:36):
 The model has become much more important in an AI world because the model helps organizations look across their entire organization at the patterns that are happening. And the patterns are what happen within an organization that when they come outside of the organization or even inside with your employees, they're the things that people pick up to say, "That's what you're about. That's your reputation." And there's signals that come out of that.

(10:13):
 Maybe the social media signals, they may be your press release, they may be in The New York Times, they may be your employees posting, they may be Glassdoor, they may be all of these things, and now they're AI. But the difference is social media could be in a little box. Only the people that are signed up are only the people that know you, you have a bad experience, you go talk about it. The only people who know you get that information and they get a little reputation idea.

(10:45):
 But now with AI, AI as a stakeholder, RepTrak has called it a stakeholder. Across the board, it is looking at all of these patterns. It's looking at all of these signals and it's making decisions about your reputation and it is owning your reputation. So when someone wants to know about your company, it has come to a conclusion about your company based on your patterns. And before we could have pattern of misalignment in our organization and we could get by with it. It might just be one little social channel that found out that we had one restaurant that had a bad manager and the food was bad or whatever, or we had a challenge in a city in Southern United States, but everybody in the globe didn't know about it. But now any of those things that we don't cover them up anymore and we can't be quiet about them anymore.

(11:48):
 So now we have to step into it and we have to really recognize the patterns that are going on in our organization. And that's where reputation architecting comes in

Doug Downs (11:58):
Because

Bonnie Caver (11:58):
You're now looking at the decisions you're making and on a pattern basis. So for instance, I like to use restaurants, but we mostly do B2B. But you have a restaurant that is a great restaurant, has great reviews, everybody loves it, but have a new manager. The new manager comes in and says, "Okay, we're going to change things up. We're changing the menu." You have some people who leave because they don't like the new manager and the service begins to go down. In social media, people start talking about it and then you have people who defend it. Oh no, that's one of my favorite restaurants. Now it continues. The patterns continue. The people who were defending it now say, "I think you're right. The restaurant's going down. I'm not going back either. Next thing you know, the restaurant's out of business. We knew what was wrong by paying attention to the signals.

(13:04):
 We knew what patterns were wrong and what needed to be fixed, but we weren't listening to them. We weren't bringing them to the people that could fix them. Now think about that with a restaurant chain that is global. There are many. Now that becomes the narrative that AI has.

(13:26):
 This restaurants aren't very good. The food's not really good. Well, that has nothing to do with what's going on. If a little restaurant happened in Austin, Texas, has nothing to do with how that restaurant operates in London, but it can become the narrative, especially if you're looking at B2B companies that have global perspective. They didn't treat their employees right in the United States. Well, now we believe they won't treat their employees right in India. So it really is looking at those patterns and we can do that by surveys. We can do that by customer listening. We can do that by operationally looking at the things that are going down where productivity is going down. AI has been a disruptor. The change didn't go. We've been working on a change perspective and I mean a change project and it's never been successful. So there's all of these things, but if you don't connect those dots as an organization, then I'm talking way too much, but if you don't connect those dots as an organization, then those become the patterns that the signals go out and that becomes your reputation.

Doug Downs (14:39):
I think a big part of what I'm hearing you say too is one of the differences between architecture and management is you need clarity of goals and clarity of direction on how to achieve those goals. So all of that needs to come into play. But what about the inevitable changes that are going to take place on the way to the finish line, which by the way will never be where the finish line originally was? Inevitably, the finish line is going to move.

Bonnie Caver (15:04):
Right. And it's looking about the things of what you want to be known for as a reputation. So we look at that brand vision as being the reputation. So if I say my brand vision is to be the top manufacturer in this area, then that's the reputation we want to have. So what are the things that we have to do to continue to be that top manufacturer? And currently products and services is table stakes and reputation,

Doug Downs (15:35):
But

Bonnie Caver (15:35):
We must also innovate. We must also take care of our employees. We must also be good citizens into our communities. We have to have CEOs that say the right things in the communities where we need to be saying them. We have to have good performance. All of that is about on a day-to-day basis. But if you don't have people looking across that and looking across all those patterns and saying, we're failing here and because we're failing here, it's going to have repercussions all these places and we either have to manage it or we have to do something about it operationally and make decisions operationally.

Doug Downs (16:16):
You mentioned early on about a scale where I can measure how close I am to management in my current practice versus how close I am to architecture. Can you just walk me through, ultimately what I want is for someone listening to say, oh, I think I'm closer to management than architecture. How do they identify where they might be? Yeah.

Bonnie Caver (16:35):
So the head in the sand is I'm sitting there with my head in the sand and the world around me

Doug Downs (16:43):
Pure reaction.

Bonnie Caver (16:44):
Pure reaction.

Doug Downs (16:44):
The

Bonnie Caver (16:44):
World around me is saying that I'm about to go out of business because I'm making all the wrong decisions, but I'm just going to keep moving forward and hope it passes. And then you've got the firefighter that every day, whatever comes about, they're fighting it at that day.

Doug Downs (17:03):
It's not their fault. Their leader just keeps putting out fires. And blame somebody else.

Bonnie Caver (17:09):
You know those organizations that you can see the kinds of things that they do. You know that they're sitting in that constant firefighter mode. And then you continue to move up the scale to where you say, we're going to do something about our reputation, so we are going to manage it. So we've got listening, we've got somebody in charge of it. We're doing risk assessments. We are measuring against risk assessments. I think probably the answer that we got today was a very high level manager.

Doug Downs (17:44):
Yeah, I wasn't sure you got a, yes, we're doing architecture, but you felt you did get that. I wasn't sure you did. But

Bonnie Caver (17:51):
On the high level management piece,

Doug Downs (17:53):
Because

Bonnie Caver (17:54):
They're at least assessing it, they have quarterly goals and they're bringing it to the level of the board to have a discussion about it. So they've got metrics on it. That's kind of a high, high level manager. When you get to architecting your reputation and that's kind of part of it, then you're looking at the patterns and you're looking at the positive of it as well as the negative. You're putting some dollars

Doug Downs (18:21):
To it.

Bonnie Caver (18:21):
You're saying all of that social media that happened is not just social media. It's telling us it's a signal that there is something wrong within our organization. So we've now taken that signal and we can manage that signal by going back and saying, "Oh, we're sorry you had a bad experience. Can I give you certificate to come back again?" Or you're reaching out in a B2B world and you're saying, "I'm sorry that we had to lay employees off. We're doing this for the good of the company, blah, blah, blah. That's all managing it." But if you come back and you look at, well, how could we have done that differently? There's something that was wrong within the organization that made that happen. So either we can fix it or we can have a different conversation going forward. So if we just laid a bunch of people off and we didn't let people know we were going to lay them off and it was a surprise and the community is surprised by it and like, oh, every time you go to work there, they're probably going to lay you off.

(19:30):
 That becomes an opportunity to start architecting. We're not saying that you're not going to do some things that are going to be disruptive. I mean that's part of it. How are you being disruptive in making those decisions? But you've got to bring people along and that's where the change management comes into it. You can't just change and grow without bringing people along. So you have

Doug Downs (19:53):
To

Bonnie Caver (19:53):
Think about reputation all the time and not about how you manage it, but how you actually grasp the opportunity.

Doug Downs (20:03):
Influence and

Bonnie Caver (20:03):
Design it. Design it. Yeah. And when there is an issue, how are you coming back and actually changing something within your organization? Because you realize that the signals that were out there are telling you that there's something wrong and that your stakeholders aren't going to buy it.

Doug Downs (20:23):
You're architecting a book right now along this very topic.

Bonnie Caver (20:27):
I am.

Doug Downs (20:27):
Okay, tell me about that.

Bonnie Caver (20:29):
Well, I'm really talking about how do you achieve reputation currency in an AI world? And AI has just, I mean, it's real time. Those pattern recognition, because that's what it does. That pattern recognition of signals has made this an urgency for organizations. We can no longer hide that we're out of alignment. We can no longer hide that we're making bad decisions as leaders. We can no longer hide that we have gaps in the way we train our organizations. And everybody's about the tools and let's look at the tools. AI's about to become an infrastructure for society. It's not about the tools. It's about changing the way we do business, the way we do everything in society. It's changing the way humans interact with each other. It's changing how we interact with technology. It's changing how we buy things. It's changing how we go to work.

(21:30):
 And that is going to change organization's reputations. Organizations that do it right will be the organizations that come out on top and will still be in business. The organizations that say reputation be damned. I'm just going to do whatever. It's about the dollar. They're short lived. They might make a lot of money for their founders, but it's short lived as to sustainability within customers.

Doug Downs (22:01):
If there's a new bank in town, you better have some money in it. You

Bonnie Caver (22:04):
Better have some money

Doug Downs (22:05):
In it. That's

Bonnie Caver (22:06):
Right.

Doug Downs (22:06):
It's so good to spend time with you. I appreciate it.

Bonnie Caver (22:09):
I talked a lot. Sorry.

Doug Downs (22:10):
No, you were awesome.

Bonnie Caver (22:11):
Kind of passionate about it.

Doug Downs (22:12):
No, you were awesome. It's a place to do it. There's so much good conversation here.

Bonnie Caver (22:15):
There is great conversation. Thank you for having me on.

Doug Downs (22:20):
Here are three things today from Bonnie Caver that you might bring up in conversation later on today or tomorrow. Number one, reputation is no longer something you manage after the fact. AI is already reading the patterns inside your organization and deciding who you are, whether you participate in that conversation or not. Number two, there's a real difference between reputation management and reputation architecture. Management writes the apology. Architecture rebuilds the thing the apology was covering for. And number three, don't build the sidewalk before you know the route. Watch the patterns already forming inside your organization before you decide what story to tell about them. If you'd like to send a message to our guest, Bonnie Caver, we've got her contact information in the show notes. Stories and Strategies is a production of Stories and Strategies Podcasts. If you liked this episode recorded live at IABC World Conference in Toronto, could you possibly leave us a rating or a review?

(23:17):
 Thank you to producers Emily Page and Jocelyn Floralde. And lastly, do us a favor, forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.