00:01 Lisa Merriam: Americans don’t trust brands like they used to.

00:04 Various tracking studies show a decades-long decline in what Forbes magazine calls a “consumer trust crisis.”

00:11 The American Marketing Association New York caught up with Kylie Wright-Ford, the new CEO of the Reputation Institute to ask her what companies can do to earn and keep trust in their reputations

00:25 Kylie Wright-Ford: We’re in the business of measuring and managing reputation and what we’ve seen over the last year is really profound.

00:31 That is a decline across the board in trust in companies in the U.S.

00:36 Brand is the promise you make, in its simplest terms, and reputation depends on whether you’ve kept that promise.

00:42 Now that we’re in this post-truth era, consumers, stakeholders, and employees are looking for signals that your company is doing the right thing.

00:53 So that is number one: Do the right thing.

00:55 We measure seven dimensions of reputation.

00:58 They include financial performance, governance, workplace, innovation, citizenship.

01:04 And so all of those things matter a lot. So do the right thing is the first thing.

01:08 The second thing is be really intentional about your communication.

01:13 It needs to be frequent, relevant, and authentic.

01:16 Communication is authentic when the whole experience with a brand is consistent.

01:22 So in this world of social media and as demographics change dramatically, and the infusion of technology makes our life easier to communicate, but also more than noisy.

01:33 We find that brands that have a consistent story relevance and frequency also tend to have the most authentic communication.

01:40 Spin is definitely not authentic communication.

01:43 There are two things that I have noticed when doing this work on how reputations are changing over time.

01:51 We’re in this really fascinating era where macro trends are having a bigger influence on reputation than in the past.

01:59 Just as the world has become more polarized on some macro themes, likewise we’re finding in our analysis that companies are getting polarized results.

02:06 For example, if you take a couple of companies you might find that equally as many people don’t like them as really like them.

02:16 That’s new for now and so we’re finding polarization, but also macro trends have a bigger influence.

02:23 So you know from experience working with leaders around the world we’re finding that people are really thinking differently about the true version of a brand.

02:31 Who they are at home and what they see in the press.

02:33 Lisa Merriam: Reputation Institute studies show that companies with strong reputations enjoy two and a half times the stock price performance as the market overall.

02:43 Now that is brilliance in marketing.