Reputation, Stock Price, and You: Why the Market Rewards Some Companies and Punishes Others

A company that takes a hit to its reputation—BP after the Gulf oil spill, Barclays after fiddling LIBOR, News Corp after the phone hacking scandal—enters a world of grief: market value falls along with employee morale, regulatory scrutiny increases, and customers defect and boycott. Reputation, Stock Price, and You: Why the Market Rewards Some Companies and Punishes Others shows how a company’s reputation is created and how reputational value impacts corporate P&L and the personal finances of its many stakeholders. Better yet, it shows what you can do to profit from, increase, protect, monitor, evaluate, restore, and even insure reputational value.

If your job, bonus, options, salary, or investments depend on the stock price of a public company—or on the sales, profitability, or value of a private company—you need to read this book to understand the concrete steps you can take to improve your firm’s reputation, reduce risks to its finances and industry standing, and reap the highest reputational dividends. Using dozens of case studies, Reputation, Stock Price, and You:
Explains how stakeholders, and their expectations, both shape and are shaped by a company’s reputation
Describes how reputations for ethics, innovation, good governance, quality, safety, sustainability, and security are created and lost
Explains why both corporate and individual stakeholder behavior affect reputational value
Shows how you can influence the expectations and behaviors of stakeholders, which in turn can improve corporate finances, reduce operational risk, and increase stock price or market value
Provides sensitive tools for tracking and predicting stock price as a function of reputational value metrics

The majority of directors at U.S. public companies now count reputation as their firm’s #1 concern, and with good reason. A firm with a superior reputation gains many benefits: Customers are more willing to pay higher prices, vendors and employees offer better terms for their services, creditors and equity investors offer better terms for capital, and regulators tend to be more forgiving. This book shows how to achieve and sustain a stellar reputation and how to convert it into its tangible form: reputational value.
What you’ll learn
How stakeholder expectations for a company help shape a company’s reputation
How actions taken by a company in managing ethics, innovation, governance, quality, safety, sustainability, and security shape stakeholder expectations
How a company’s reputation affects stakeholder behavior
How corporate executives and directors have the unique opportunity to frame the entire reputation-forming process and build it into governance policies
Why professional marketing and communications efforts play a relatively minor role in reputation formation
How the behavior of stakeholders collectively determine a company’s stock price or market value
How to measure and improve your company's reputation and thus improve results in all areas