What the store is worth when nobody is looking.
Explore Reputation
What a reputation is, how it differs from a brand, how trust is measured, and what the documented cases teach about keeping it.
Brand versus reputation: what is the difference?
A brand is what a company says and shows about itself. A reputation is what other people conclude from what it does. One is authored, the other is earned, and in a buying meeting the second one decides.
The Edelman Trust Barometer
An annual survey of trust in four institutions, business, government, media and non-governmental organisations, published by the communications firm Edelman every year since 2001. It is the most widely cited public measure of institutional trust, and it is worth understanding both what it shows and what it is.
1982. The Tylenol case
In the autumn of 1982, seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules that had been laced with potassium cyanide. Johnson & Johnson pulled the product nationally, warned the public not to take it, and reintroduced it in tamper-evident packaging. It remains the reference case in crisis communications, and it is routinely misread.
Trust architecture
Trust architecture is Brave New's name for the deliberate arrangement of evidence a buyer encounters before they are willing to commit. It is our term, not an established concept in the literature, and this entry says so plainly because a reference work that passes off its own vocabulary as received wisdom is not a reference work.
Reputation risk
Reputation risk is the exposure a company carries from the gap between what people expect of it and what it actually does. It is not the risk of bad publicity. It is the risk that an existing gap gets discovered, which is a different thing and is managed differently.