‘Tis the season for reputation surveys; It’s time for a change
To advise the C-suite, communications teams must stop relying on past sentiment and start measuring emotional intensity, writes Stagwell and Allison Worldwide’s Ray Day.
By: Ray Day, Stagwell
It’s the most wonderful time of the year for corporate communications leaders: reputation survey season.
In the past few weeks, several longstanding benchmarks were released. All remain useful reference points for understanding reputation. Yet these annual rankings and sentiment-based metrics are missing a major communications opportunity: most are backward-looking. They explain how people feel after something has already happened, not what will drive action, trigger escalation or mitigate risk in the future.
In an era defined by declining trust, the next evolution in reputation leadership is the shift from focusing on sentiment to emotion.
Sentiment tells whether a reaction is positive or negative. Emotion tells what people care about most intensely. Intensity, not tone, is what ultimately drives behavior. Understanding emotional drivers determines whether people will mobilize, disengage, forgive, pressure regulators or escalate an issue internally or publicly.
Too many communications teams are still operating using a decades-old playbook. A spike in negative sentiment might signal dissatisfaction, yet it does not reveal whether an issue resonates deeply enough to trigger action. Measuring emotion allows communicators to move from response to foresight.
Today’s communications leaders need both: a periodic multi-stakeholder, multi-market reputation study combined with always-on predictive analytics.
The most common request from the C-suite to the communications team today is, “Help us get ahead of what’s to come — help us see around corners.”
Predictive analytics — particularly those based on principles of risk, behavior and neuroscience — allows companies to understand why audiences feel the way they do. This is done through deep analysis of societal, industry and brand data. The secret is to see through all the noise and pinpoint the intense emotional signals that identify risk and opportunity at the earliest stages.
The clarity a focus on being predictive provides, including emotional intensity and resonance, paves the way for communications responses that connect best with stakeholders.
Leading communicators already are shifting resources from measuring reputation too often to putting in place predictive analytics, or early warning systems that indicate what’s coming in the headlines, employee engagement scores, regulatory scrutiny or market reaction. In doing so, they are elevating communications’ seat at the table to an unprecedentedly positive level.
It’s time we all embrace reputation and predictive analytics as the way forward for world class communications.
View article on PRWeek: https://www.prweek.com/article/1949813/tis-season-reputation-surveys-its-time-change
Ray Day is Stagwell’s vice chair and Allison Worldwide's executive chair. He is the former chief communications officer at both Ford and IBM.