Review: Strategic Reputation Management

Strategic Reputation Management: Identify strengths, manage performance and protect your brand
Amanda Coleman
2025, Kogan Page, 213 pages

‘Public relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you’. The opening to the CIPR’s definition of public relations is well known. It’s a neat phrase – but there’s a problem with it.

Post Office PR advisers will have believed they were protecting the organisation’s reputation when they dismissed claims about the failure of the Horizon IT system that led to the persecution and prosecution of many subpostmasters. And so does every powerful person using the law to protect themselves from public scrutiny.

In other words, reputation management is gaining a bad reputation.

Tony Langham is one author of a book on reputation who has recently revised his view. 

‘In 2018 I wrote a book proclaiming that reputation management was the future of corporate communications and public relations. Six years on, I’m not so sure… The term “reputation management” now conjures images of digital dark arts or legions of lawyers working for bad people.’ 

Amanda Coleman has a strong reputation for her expertise in crisis communication. What’s her take on reputation management in her latest book?

She certainly admits to doubts up front. ‘Throughout my career I have often wrestled with the concept of reputation management,’ she writes at the start of the preface.

Her argument is that the conventional formula needs to be turned on its head. Rather than public relations being seen as all about reputation, reputation needs to be viewed as about more than public relations. ‘Reputation management is about the whole of the business, brand, or organization.’

The book talks us through the concept of reputation and the principles of reputation management with practical advice on building, protecting and repairing reputations and understanding the relationship between reputation and crisis.

There’s a brief survey of the history of reputation management. This leads to a revised definition of reputation: ‘the way an organization or business is viewed by individuals and groups.’

Though simple, this effectively deals with the Post Office problem of misguided reputation management, because the organisation is clearly viewed less favourably since the details of the Horizon scandal have emerged. An effective strategic reputation management approach would have addressed the problem sooner and with greater transparency, even though this might have caused a loss of face and even a loss of employment for some senior Post Office executives.

Public relations advisers should first, like doctors, ensure they do no harm. This is a fundamental ethical principle, and it’s good to see that ethics is given a whole chapter in the book.

Her revised definition of reputation leads to the insight that measuring reputation should involve an active exercise in listening to stakeholders. Conventional measures of reputation have primarily been applicable to stock market listed private sector businesses (eg shareholder value). It’s been much harder to measure and monitor the reputation of a public sector or third sector organisation.

This leads to a question I posed to the author when I first saw the proofs of this book. Why is it that reputation crises so often seem to affect public sector and third sector organisations even though they exist to serve the public interest in a way that private business does not? I had speculated about the quality of management but perhaps the more obvious explanation is accountability: profits, share price, shareholder value, a board including non-executive directors are all ways of holding a private sector CEO accountable. Is there the same level of scrutiny and accountability when it comes to the head of a university, a hospital trust, a charity or a police force? Is this part of the new role of public relations, acting as we’re told it should in the public interest?

Coleman’s conclusion is that reputation should be viewed as part of business resilience. ‘This elevates reputation management and influence from the realms of PR and communication and places it as a strategic business function.’

The author addresses the paradoxes – the exceptions to the rule. Ryanair is Europe’s largest airline, though it seems to revel in having a poor reputation. Amazon (and the other giant technology companies) are widely condemned yet have achieved near monopolies. ‘Most businesses and organizations are not able to operate with a disregard to emerging challenges and negative perceptions. Where Amazon is little impacted by a minor protest against it, smaller businesses would be affected more significantly.’ The rules simply do not apply to these giants.

Coleman is on solid ground when she addresses the risk, issues and crisis cycle, though this is also the space where Andrew Griffin’s 2014 book on Crisis, Issues and Reputation Management also published by Kogan Page remains the classic text.

She addresses propaganda, fake news and misinformation throughout. Though artificial intelligence is mentioned, there is so much more that could have been considered. Do we now need to add AI into our stakeholder mapping exercises because of the threat of reputational damage from non-human actors?

People have always been at the heart of reputational crises. Until now.