What reputation costs under pressure

Brand capital is only measurable at the moment you spend it. Notes from fifteen years of watching companies spend it badly.

You cannot see a balance until something is withdrawn. The withdrawal is the incident, and how the market responds to it is the closest thing to a direct read on accumulated trust that exists.

The companies that recover fastest share one trait, and it is not speed of response. It is that their account of what happened matches the account the market had already formed independently.

Where recovery stalls is when a company’s crisis voice is unrecognisable next to its ordinary voice. Fifteen years of careful warmth followed by four paragraphs of legal register reads as a confession.