This week’s Reputation Reboot fields a question from a university administrator at the center of the current sexual assault crisis. In handling a sexual assault case, the administrator’s position requires he or she considers the university’s reputation above all other factors. What steps can the administrator take to protect his or her own reputation in the long-term while serving victims?
As we publish this topic, students continue to face grave threats. Most institutions are failing to provide the information and resources that students need to protect themselves from becoming victims of sexual assault on campus…and to appropriately address the crisis when they are.
Our advice in this week’s Reputation Reboot will help you look your best on Google if you are preparing re-enter the job market. It is in response to an MBA candidate who wants to put her best foot forward when prospective employers research her on the Internet. But our tips can be utilized by anyone undertaking a job search. Not only will they help differentiate yourself from your peers…they can become a major asset in your long-term career development.
Lawsuits happen for many reasons…and can impact the best businesses. Once they occur, many types of legal notices appear on the Internet. They can stay there for years. In this week’s Reputation Reboot, we answer a COO’s question regarding how long it takes for an online reputation management campaign to lessen the prominence of such material.
Video is an ideal tool to promote personal brands. It gives you more control over your image and it is an excellent way to establish a new image for yourself (and your organization) as you pursue new initiatives, build new audiences and seek investment capital. As an added benefit, the video will function as a portfolio piece to interest producers of broadcast media in featuring you as a guest expert on their programs.
In this week’s Reputation Reboot, we provide tips for a start-up CEO who is concerned his youthful appearance may be a drawback as he seeks out investors.
If you’re concerned about age discrimination in the job marketplace, you have plenty of company. It’s a challenge for both men and women…and not only on the upper age spectrum. Entrepreneurs and employees in their 20s and 30s also face it. We’ve heard many stories about their strategies to project an image they feel will help them win VC funding or a promotion.
This week in Reputation Reboot, we provide strategic advice to a seasoned female executive who seeks tips for minimizing age discrimination in her job search. Next week, we will offer solutions to a 29-year old male CEO who faces a different type of challenge.
Negative employee reviews are a growing problem for many companies. According to a survey published today in The Wall Street Journal’s Risk & Compliance section:
A survey of 1,012 U.S. adults by Corporate Responsibility Magazine and Cielo Healthcare found 86% of women who responded said theywouldn’t join a company with a bad reputation, compared with 65% of men. And 92% of men and women said they would consider leaving their present jobs to join a company with an excellent reputation.
That makes this week’s Reputation Reboot topic a timely one. It addresses one of the most frequently asked questions we receive: how to improve employee reviews.
I’m pleased to introduce Reputation Reboot, our new weekly advice column.
Reputation Reboot is the result of years of being asked for advice, counsel and services regarding online reputation issues by CEOs, leadership teams, VIPs, rising stars and many other types of people and their organizations. Their questions have come up through business channels and networking events as well as other settings ranging from dinner parties to airports.
Our main goal with the column is simply to educate readers. Online reputation management (ORM) has a best-practices playbook that ORM providers customize with their own secret sauce. But the game changes when you are a high-profile or high net worth individual. There is already so much content about you online that the standard approaches will fail to rebrand your image. Templates that work for many won’t work for you. That, in a nutshell, is why we publish You(Online).
With Reputation Reboot, we also want to contribute to the greater understanding of this fast-growing industry. There is much confusion over how ORM differs from branding, public relations and digital marketing. (The quick explanation: It addresses the core goal of restructuring the order of content that appears on Google and other search engines.)
Lastly, working in this field provides us with a bird’s eye view of digital culture. The Internet sphere and all of the issues that come with it — crises, privacy, endless conversations, freedom of speech, social upheaval and the ability to connect with anyone in the world — are very now. It is a fascinating place to be. We hope that by sharing our front-row view with you we will help you shape your digital image. That’s because we want the world to see you the way you want to be seen. Enter Reputation Reboot.
Not so long ago, Volkswagen claimed the top auto industry spot in Fortune’s annual World’s Most Admired Companies list. The Economist highlighted the Germany automaker’s global ascent in an article titled “VW Conquers the World.”
Now a scandal has put Volkswagen’s reputation in freefall. It comes at a time when Germany is in the world’s eye – leading the EU toward resolution of many issues, most notably the migrant crisis. VW is Germany’s largest employer and as iconic as Starbucks or Ford is in the United States. As far as scandals go, this is a massive one. It has damaged the opinion that many of us have had that the brand means something special—an opinion that extends back to the Beetle.
General Motors covered up faulty ignition switches for years — and they resulted in several deaths as well as 30 million recalls. But GM is back and selling lots of cars. Can Volkswagon recover?
We spend a lot of time observing best and worst practices in reputation rebuilding at companies large and small. Here are our top tips for VW’s beleaguered leadership.
Follow Mary Barra’s lead. As CEO of General Motors, she has performed crisis management almost flawlessly. All CEOs can learn from her use of social media to communicate with consumers.
Take a page from Toyota. We’ve written extensively about why and how the top car company has adeptly rebounded from multiple crises.
It’s worth taking a look at the tremendous shifts in reputation VW has experienced over the course of its 75-year history.
An Unlikely Origin
VW began as a state-supported operation in Nazi Germany. While Hitler heralded the Beetle as an affordable “people’s car” (in German, volkswagen), VW’s early years did not live up to that reputation. “Only 630 Beetles were made there during World War II—and distributed to the privileged,” according to Der Spiegel.
A Reputation Reborn
Demand for Beetles during the occupation kept VW alive following World War II, but there was little international interest. After looking at the company as a possible acquisition, the CEO of Ford, for instance, famously concluded that VW wasn’t “worth a damn.” But over the coming years Beetle’s popularity made it a symbol of West Germany’s “economic miracle,” and VW’s success was “one of postwar Europe’s most glittering economic achievements,” according to a Time magazine article from 1963. By that year it was the world’s third largest automaker, and less than a decade later the Beetle’s total production count eclipsed Henry Ford’s Model-T.
Transformation: from “Hitler’s car” to “Beetlemania”
Upon its initial introduction in the United States, VW’s reputation couldn’t escape the Nazi association. “I even tried calling the VW the ‘Victory Wagon’ to take the curse off it, but the press referred to it only as ‘Hitler’s car,’” said Dutch car dealer Ben Pon, who shipped the first Beetles stateside in the late 1940s. Soon, though, New York agency Doyle Dane Bernbach wiped away that stigma with a string of unforgettable advertising campaigns, including “Think Small,” Advertising Age’s top campaign of the century. By emphasizing VW’s impact on an owner’s reputation and image instead of the traditional touting of features, these campaigns were an innovative and influential development in the history of advertising.
Post-Beetle: less risk, but no more mania
When Beetlemania subsided, the void left by such a defining model threatened to undo VW’s reputational gains. Not wanting to repeat the same mistake, the company unveiled a more diverse series of models, including the Passat, Golf and Polo. VW acquired Audi in 1964, and those new models integrated the technology and luxury Audi was known for. They prevented VW’s image from flat-lining but ushered in an extended period of mixed results. Things began to look brighter by the turn of the new millennium, as Audi’s jump to the luxury class occupied by BMW and Mercedes-Benz gave VW’s reputation a boost in the same direction.
Poised for a boom
Reputation has played a major factor in VW’s more recent global endeavors. In many countries “it has been around long enough to be seen as a domestic firm, so protectionists usually leave it alone,” according to The Economist. Its longstanding reputation in China helped distinguish it from pack in the world’s largest auto market. “VW bet on China nearly 30 years ago,” The Economist noted. “A glut of cheap cars is hurting prices in China but VW’s premium models are doing well.”
Rebuilding its image will be crucial for VW’s future success. Only a few years ago, its crowdsourced “People’s Car Project” engaged China’s drivers, attracting 119,000 ideas and 33 million hits. Incorporating that kind of virtual strategy in the climb to regain its reputation might help VW recover…if it can.
