Consumer Goods & Services

July 18, 2023

ESG risk is one of a growing number of stakeholder-centric issues falling under the greater rubric of reputation risk. High-profile, costly risk management failures at AB InBev (Bud Light), Southwest Airlines and Silicon Valley Bank indicate that it is time for risk management to be more fully integrated into corporate processes, like marketing: #letriskmanagersmanagerisk! Reputation risk management needs to be a standard area of enterprise risk management responsibility. Can we drink to that?

June 23, 2023

Protect your reputation by authenticating your risk management with reputation insurance.

“As of now, we’re starting to learn that what made OceanGate’s expeditions cost-effective and easy to execute were also factors that increased the risk and dangers to passengers. […] It seems as though OceanGate might have attempted to skirt many of these complexities in favor of saving money.”

May 1, 2023

CEOs Going Viral Starbucks

CEOs Going Viral. Starbucks founder Howard Schultz recently clashed with Sen. Bernie Sanders “There being nothing to surprise their respective stakeholders, raise their emotional states, and shift their prior expectations, I don’t think there was any material reputational impact to anyone,” Kossovsky wrote.

March 16, 2023

Child labor in supply chains. Think about reputation risk management now as a potential differentiator and a competitive advantage.

The U.S. Department of Labor has now launched an investigation and said it will hold not only companies that employ child labor accountable, but the larger, better known companies that have child labor in their supply chains. The new regulatory stakeholders in companies’ supply chains bring with them investors and litigators, who had material financial consequences to activities already being followed by activists.

February 28, 2023

Companies need an authenticated forward-looking oversight process to manage risk strategically.

“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 officer when it declined to dismiss claims brought by stockholders against David Fairhurst, McDonald’s former head of human resources…”.[kos] The bottom line is that law and society are expecting better management and oversight—a touch of common sense many would say—and that disappointment (read, shift in expectations leading to anger and disappointment, aka, reputation crisis) is playing out in the courts….Companies and boards need a solid, universally applicable management and oversight process that is forward-looking to manage risk strategically. The quality of that process needs to be proactively authenticated with insurance. Compliance-focused controls, which by design are backward looking—and the audits that authenticate them—are necessary but with the evolving expectations of society, apparently no longer sufficient.

February 20, 2023

Mission critical risk denial can be costly. It is an ongoing reputational crisis…(due to) poor risk management and governance.

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 take an $800 million dollar write-down for Q4 and record losses three times greater than analysts had expected. Equity returns 42 days into the crisis show Southwest trailing the Dow Jones U.S. Airlines Index by 18.4%. Had it merely kept pace with that index, Southwest’s market cap would have been more than $3.3 billion higher.