There was an interesting article by American PR man Richard Levick in Forbes magazine at the end of March, essentially asking whether as a B2B business, Goldman Sachs needs to care about the reputational damage and negative online coverage it has received over the "Toxic & Destructive"/ "Muppet Clients" claims made by its former trader Greg Smith in The New York Times.
Levick argues that for a company owned mainly by institutions, in the old days Goldman Sachs could have smoothed things over with a few phone calls and meetings, and moved on. But today, the power of social media to both disseminate and sustain a story, draws in regulators, politicians and decision makers that Goldman Sachs probably does care about for the longer term; that every citizen's opinion is both aggregated and amplified throughout all the social media channels and which effects the thinking of decision-makers who are as susceptible as any other human.
In such an environment, persistent reputational issues could potentially lead for instance to a persistent public insistence on greater regulatory oversight or an unwillingness by government ministers to listen to their lobbying on a wide range of issues. I would have thought that to say to anyone outside of banking that you work for Goldman Sachs immediately raises negative connotations in the listener's mind. And what will make that go away unless Goldman Sachs communicates more proactively and widely than it does now?
Levick observes that a week after Smith’s New York Times article, a Google search of “Greg Smith” and “Goldman Sachs” yielded more than seven million hits and “as somebody at the SEC once said to somebody at the DOJ, ‘Hey, seven million muppets can’t be wrong.’”
Here in the UK, the persistent political and NGO attacks on all banks (whether they took money from the government or not); the additional taxes and levies a Tory Chancellor has imposed on them; and the media bludgeoning of every pay rise and bonus awarded to a bank worker, should serve as warning of what happens when a sector’s reputation goes into freefall.
While how an organisation communicates with the media and stakeholders rarely leads to a company going under (Ratner being a glorious exception), those that are damaged temporarily or more persistently, are often undone by a mismatch between the crafted brand image (i.e. what has previously been claimed and communicated by an organisation) and its actions. The casualty list (killed off and the walking wounded) of B2B organisations underdone by their reputation mismanagement is long – ranging from the likes of Arthur Andersen to BP and TEPCO to FIFA.
Andrew Caesar-Gordon
