Reputational risks are real and have adverse effects far beyond one’s comprehension. While not all reputational risks are damaging or have concrete impacts on businesses, serious allegations such as terrorist financing, corruption, money laundering or human trafficking have serious repercussions if these activities are proven to have passed through an entity. According to a recent research analysis, many companies overestimate their performance when it comes to representing reputation. While overestimating itself might be a risk if the company’s services don’t align with promotional material. On average 58% of the executives believe reputation building is a serious contributor to success. However, only 15% bother to do anything serious to protect their reputation. Before jumping onto the bandwagon of blindly following strategies for building reputation, let’s get into understanding what “reputation” in adverse media screening stands for.
How You See Yourself Or How Others Perceive You: What’s Important?
With regard to anti-money laundering, adverse media monitoring is a part of enabling comprehensive background checks. Reputation, with respect to media adversaries, goes beyond how you see yourself or where you wish to exist on the industry ladder. Reputational security in online adverse media screening is defined as “how others see you as”. This perception itself is comprised of two core elements:
- Perception of your business capability – including your products and services (what your business does). Efforts to build this domain are more sustainable in the longer run as results are reliant on the customer’s point of view.
- Perception your your business character – including partner, stakeholder, in short “who works with the business” constitutes this aspect of reputation security. This category is more volatile and more prone to fluctuations.
Keeping in mind two streams that connect to build reputation, it’s important to understand how adverse media screening can help businesses attain perfection across both.
How Does Adverse Media Linked With Reputation?
In the past eighteen months, there seems to be a significant increase in the number of articles, guides, and attention in insurance and associated industries focusing on reputational risk. The Scandal, commonly referred to as “Dieselgate” revolves around volkswagen. The world’s third largest car manufacturer altered reports from software “ defeat device” minimizing the percentage of nitrogen emissions and issuing their cars as compliant to reduce emissions. This controversy had serious consequences for Volkswagen and Defeat Device, depicting how online adverse media checks can build or kill a brand’s image. Analysis by Research Institute revealed that 83% of customers say that they would buy products from companies with good reputations while only 9% would purchase from companies with bad reputations as well. The result signifies the rising need for building comprehensive adverse media screening solutions for your business.
5 Step Adverse Media Screening to Reverse Reputational Damage
Unlike dozens of online resources adding strategies to protect reputation, let’s discuss how to undo the damage, starting from resilience to rebuilding. Effective reputation development consists of the following adverse media solutions:
- Usual Vs Different Approach
As the world is becoming more and more digitized, adverse media is increasing faster than ever. Amidst the ongoing landscape, businesses must revamp their security protocols by:
- Conducting comprehensive background checks of stakeholders, partners, and customers.
- Building resilience to fight against new forms of crimes and new forms of media advertising, which are at some point intentioned to be defamatory
- Minding communication, keeping in view global trends, modern vocabulary and use of terminologies.
For Instance: LG faced backlash, on mocking iPhone getting folding in pockets, after the revelation that their post itself was made by an Apple device.
- Analysis Of Adverse Event
Once the damage has been done, you can still reverse it by implementing comprehensive adverse media screening within your workflow. Additional measures may include:
- Understanding the sentiment of the adverse media
- Communicate within the organization for prompt detection of gaps
- Setting up rapid response to media adversaries by acknowledging the error (if real) because acceptance of misconduct reduces backlash by half a percent.
- Modern Media Sources
Online adverse news screening may not be directly related to reversing personal damage done, however, deploying adverse media checks, and covering all social media platforms within, minimizes future threats.
For example: Zara’s defamation after a controversial marketing campaign symbolizing injustice in Gaza, faced calls for boycott (not mentioned in any of the traditional adverse media sources), thus businesses may miss out on crucial information.
- Re-Build Reputation
In a complex network of coverage, where every move is being noted, global compliance with mandated regulations cannot be avoided. To rebuild the reputation, it is imperative to conduct comprehensive adverse media screening with a top-up of:
- Strengthening business reputation by ensuring complaint
- Enhance internal controls of security and risk mitigation
- Reflect back and learn from the damaging event
Summing it up
It would not be wrong to say that determining when to perform screening, who to screen and the capacity to make informed decisions is vital in protecting a business’s reputation. These small decisions draw a line between making adverse media services a success or failure.
