This piece appeared on the UK site Mediatel earlier this week

It has been reported in the UK press that Barclays are ‘likely’ to cancel their sponsorship of football’s Premier League – an association that goes back 13 years, at a cost of something like £40million a season. A final decision has yet to be taken, we read, but ‘Board members’ believe that the sponsorship has delivered ‘zero value’. ‘The Sunday Telegraph’ reported: ‘One (senior figure) said that Barclays did not need promotion in the UK as the bank has high street branches around the country and its name is well known. “We just need to shut up for five years and get on with our job,” the source said’.

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I didn’t go to the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. In fact I’ve never been. It’s not that I don’t like looking at new shiny things as much as the next man, it’s just that I have never found these huge events particularly useful. But it’s fun to read about the shiny things – almost as much fun as reading the assembled advertising throng’s tweets, posts and blogs justifying the trip by stressing just how crucial this stuff is for them professionally. When we all know that really they just want to stare and point at the new shiny things like the rest of us.

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Last week’s Cog Blog was about what people think about organisations, and why that matters. Today’s continues and expands upon that theme.

A positive reputation creates a carapace around an organisation that sees it through the tough times. It gives a business ‘bouncebackability’. A good example is Apple, whose reputation was for many years the personal responsibility of the guy at the top, Steve Jobs. Jobs recognised that if he could create a sense of something close to unconditional love amongst his loyal customers those same loyal customers would forgive him almost anything. When problems hit the loyalists would shrug and assume that Apple/Jobs would sort it out. As indeed they/he invariably did.

Compare and contrast Apple with Blackberry. Read more

A company’s reputation is one of its most important strategic assets. What people think of you has a great deal to do with how they feel about you, which in turn has a great deal to do with whether or not they’ll do business with you. Reputation is a critical drivers of sales and business success (there’s a widely accepted correlation between reputation and share price) and as such it should be of strategic concern to any business’s top management starting with the Chairman and his Board.

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It’s the time of year for predictions. Every self-respecting blog, magazine and newspaper does them. Most are wrong and can easily be proved to be so – assuming that is you can be bothered to keep hold of them for 12 months. Many are self-serving (‘online ads will increasingly be measured by their viewability’ predicts a company selling a viewability metric). Maybe there should be a league table with promotions (to ‘AdAge’) and relegations (to ‘Metro’), a time of reckoning every year which ranks forecasters by the accuracy of their predictions.

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