Features of Risk

Reputation risk features typically include economic harm from angry, disappointed stakeholders that is often exacerbated by media amplification. Steel City Re helps executives, companies, and sovereign entities identify and defend against these risks.

Reputation risk is a threat to reputation value—a behavioral economic construct.

Customers’ decision to purchase, employees’ desires to be employed by a particular firm, the rating of bonds by credit analysts, the recommendations for equities by buy-side analysts, and the decision to prosecute by regulators are all social processes. All are influenced by stories. When those stories speak to quality products, superior employment experiences, authentic systems for risk management, quality governance and compliance in terms that create expectations; they produce corporate (and personal) value.

Stories that create value promote emotional investments—such as trust—in quality, ethics, safety, security, sustainability, and innovation.

Media stories are merely one of many influencers of expectations. Other influences include:

  • Corporate culture evidenced in governance decisions
  • Financial and extra-financial information
  • Associations and affiliations
  • Stakeholders’ own experiences

Reputation risk, the economic threat to enterprise value, lurks in the gap between stakeholder expectations and operational reality. When reality falls short, media plays a role in amplifying and exacerbating stakeholder disappointment and anger.

“Brexiteers promised the advantages of EU membership with none of the disadvantages …disillusionment was inevitable.”

Bagehot, The Economist

When stakeholders hold a company, its executives or its board culpable for their disappointment, the anger creates go-forward reputational value losses, which are “costs of disappointment.”

Disappointed stakeholders destroy value by becoming disloyal customers, disengaged employees, distracted suppliers, distrustful creditors, dismissive investors, and determined litigators & regulators.

Reputation risk features include the potential to blossom into full blown reputational crises with the speed and intensity of a tornado. That is why reputation risk management—a battle for the mind of stakeholders—must begin preemptively. Insurances can be a key part of this effort.

Authentic stories prepositioned and widely shared are reputation tornado shelters—protection against climate change of the cultural kind. The stories must be simple, convincing and completely credible. They must illustrate corporate reputation risk management systems, policies and procedures, backed by demonstrable evidence such as third party insurances, so that stakeholders can appreciate and value corporate intent and direct anger away from company, its executives or its board.

Redirected anger underpins reputation resilience.

Relevant Articles

Reputation insurer Steel City Re is offering boards of directors access to its proprietary reputation volatility metrics (RVM) reports as a standalone product in response to recent bank crises.

March 27, 2023

Reputation insurer Steel City Re is offering boards of directors access to its proprietary reputation volatility metrics (RVM) reports as a standalone product in response …
READ MORE
Companies need an authenticated forward-looking oversight process to manage risk strategically.

February 28, 2023

“For the first time since its landmark Caremark decision, the Delaware Chancery Court has allowed a breach of oversight claim to proceed against a corporate …
READ MORE
Mission critical risk denial can be costly. It is an ongoing reputational crisis…(due to) poor risk management and governance.

February 20, 2023

Mission critical risk denial can be costly. A holiday flight cancellation fiasco by Southwest Airlines crushed the company’s market capitalization and caused the company to …
READ MORE