How to Build a Corporate Reputation

KPMG Australia’s reputation is in tatters.

The firm has lost its CEO, its chairman, and its chief operating officer.¹ Lendlease, a client for 68 years, walked.² Macquarie Group’s $100m account, according to the AFR, gone.³ IAG ended a 26-year audit relationship worth $11.6 million a year (AFR).³ Hundreds of jobs cut.⁴ A parliamentary committee with powers to compel documents and examine witnesses is still asking questions the firm’s own investigations were scoped to avoid.⁵

None of this arrived without warning. The profession had been through it before. PwC Australia’s tax scandal.⁶ KPMG UK.⁷ KPMG Netherlands.⁸ Each time, the same pattern: a culture that tolerated misconduct, leadership that resisted reform until forced, and a communications response that made the damage worse.

KPMG Australia now faces the corporate reputation rebuild. That rebuild will take years.

Roy Morgan’s research reinforces our experience: distrust can rise rapidly, while rebuilding trust is slow and uneven. It can take more than five years.⁹

This is Reputation Management.

How? A communications plan that supports the business plan. It must be easy to read:

• Aim
• Context
• Guiding Principles
• Objectives
• Implementation (strategies, tactics, resources)

Every communications plan begins with a single question: what reputation do we want to have in three years?

The first question we ask every client is sharper. What outcome do you want? If the answer is “We want to do the minimum we can get away with,” walk away. If the answer is “We want to come out of this with a corporate reputation our staff and clients are proud of,” stay.

In our experience, the first option costs less in the first weeks and more in every year after. The latter option costs more in the first weeks and pays for itself for years.

A weak Aim sounds like corporate spin: “to be recognised as a leader in our industry.” A strong Aim is specific: “to be regarded by federal policymakers and national media as the most credible voice on the challenges facing the sector, within three years.”

Only one of those can be measured. The other is decoration.

Three years is right. Longer and you can’t see the horizon. Three years is enough to get the right teams in place, establish behaviours, demonstrate consistency, and collate the evidence to prove it.

Context describes where we are now, the circumstances that make this plan necessary.

For KPMG, the context is that trust is low not just in the firm but across the profession.

For The Commonwealth Bank before the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, the bank was deep in public distrust after AUSTRAC alleged more than 53,000 breaches of money-laundering laws.¹⁰

For Optus, three crises in three years, one associated with multiple deaths.¹¹ Roy Morgan rated Optus as Australia’s most distrusted brand in the 12 months to June 2026, following the third crisis, the fatal Triple Zero outage.¹²

Being honest about the starting point is the first act of credibility. If the plan is built on a version of reality the board prefers rather than the one the public already knows, every word that follows is wasted.

Guiding principles are the decision-making rules that govern the plan. When someone in the organisation faces a difficult Crisis Communications choice, the principles should answer the question before they have to ask it.

They differ by organisation.

For Wilkinson Group, the five guiding behaviours are: Excellence, Nimbleness, Creativity, Strong & Honest Relationships, and Constant Learning.¹⁷ Those aren’t values on a wall. Strong & Honest Relationships means we tell clients what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

For Optus, rebuilding reputation after three crises in three years, including triple-zero failures leading to deaths, the guiding principles might look different. Saving lives overrides everything: the moment Optus identified that triple-zero calls were failing, the primary question was how to restore the service and check on the people who had needed the service.¹¹ Speed is essential: the delays compound distrust, because the public has already learned that Optus is slow. Say what you know: communicate quickly and accurately. Actions before statements: don’t announce reforms you haven’t made yet. Say what you have done.

Trust = Truth + Transparency + Traceability. It’s a formula we designed to be easy to remember. Truth means pursuing the full facts, not the version that suits the narrative. Transparency means communicating openly, including what went wrong and what is being done about it. Traceability means every claim can be checked: a named source, a dated report, a verifiable action. If any of the three is missing, trust does not hold.

The Aim describes the destination. Guiding Principles and Context describe where we are. Objectives describe what must change.

Most often, the Aim is achieved by addressing each stakeholder separately. This is where a plan can fail. Some treat stakeholders as a list and move straight to tactics. The discipline is that each stakeholder gets its own objective, designed specifically to improve trust.

For a crisis, the objectives can be tight and immediate. For building a corporate reputation, they are broader and sustained over the rebuild.

Consider a school building its reputation:

• Ensure students feel safe, supported, and able to describe what the school stands for in their own words.
• Ensure teachers are equipped to represent the school’s values in every interaction with students and parents, confidently and consistently.
• Ensure parents regard the school as transparent about its decisions and responsive when concerns are raised.
• Ensure the board receives evidence, not assurance, that the school’s reputation among its community matches the reputation it claims.
• Ensure media, if they call, find a school that responds promptly, speaks clearly, and has nothing to hide.

Each of those can be checked. Each requires different implementation.

A strategy is the approach. A tactic is the activity.

Strategies survive changing circumstances. Tactics are adjusted as opportunities arise.

“Stay ahead of the narrative with regular national media commentary” is a strategy. “Provide a press release to the Australian Financial Review” is a tactic.

Implementation needs a timeline. A common structure:

• Phase One: stop the crisis in month one
• Phase Two: start a credible rebuild in months two to four
• Phase Three: broaden influence and measure progress

The phases are not arbitrary. Credibility must be established before influence is possible.

And it needs resourcing: budget, people, and time.

Most organisations lose motivation unless the CEO or the board pushes for the long-term plan. Day-to-day pressure takes over. An under-resourced plan does more damage than no plan, because it creates expectations it cannot meet.

Commonwealth Bank is the case study boards should reference. Before the 2017-19 Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, the bank was deep in distrust.⁹ AUSTRAC had alleged more than 53,000 breaches of anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism laws.¹⁰ Before the hearings, CEO Ian Narev moved on.¹³ His successor, Matt Comyn, took charge and said immediately: “We have not done enough to protect our customers. That starts with me and our senior executives.”¹⁴

Comyn didn’t announce reforms he hadn’t made. He changed behaviour, reported on it, and sustained that for years. No single statement rebuilt the bank’s standing. Consistency did.

By 2026, seven years after the Royal Commission’s final report, CBA had been named Roy Morgan’s Most Trusted Bank Brand15 and ranked fourth among Australia’s most trusted, behind only Bunnings, Aldi, and Kmart.¹⁶

Roy Morgan’s data tells a similar story for all organisations. Trust takes years to build, seconds to lose, and years again to restore.

The organisations that recover are the ones whose actions match their words long after the headlines move on.

Reputation is inherited by whoever leads next. A board that treats it as governance hands over something durable.

A board that treats it as messaging hands over a repair job, and a shorter runway to fix it than the last one had.

The future of reputation belongs to boards that build it as infrastructure, long before they need it as insurance.

Update, October 2026: if the damage is already public, the starting point changes. See recovering a damaged reputation.

1. KPMG Australia leadership departures and governance overhaul – ABC News, 23 June 2026
2. KPMG parliamentary hearing and Lendlease’s 68-year audit relationship – ABC News, 19 June 2026
3. KPMG client losses and reported AFR figures for Macquarie and IAG – Wilkinson Group, 19 September 2026
4. KPMG Australia FY26 result and workforce reduction – KPMG Australia, 24 August 2026
5. KPMG whistleblower investigation shortcomings – KPMG Australia, 29 May 2026
6. PwC Australia tax confidentiality breach – PwC Australia, 29 May 2023
7. KPMG UK sanctions over Carillion audits – Financial Reporting Council, 12 October 2023
8. KPMG Netherlands training-test misconduct – KPMG Netherlands Integrated Report 2022–2023
9. Roy Morgan brand trust recovery modelling – Roy Morgan, October 2025
10. CBA admitted 53,750 AML/CTF Act breaches – AUSTRAC, 4 June 2018
11. Optus crises, Triple Zero failures and guiding-principle example – Wilkinson Group
12. Optus ranked Australia’s most distrusted brand in the 12 months to June 2026 – Roy Morgan, 24 August 2026
13. Matt Comyn succeeded Ian Narev as CBA CEO – Commonwealth Bank, 29 January 2018
14. Matt Comyn’s April 2018 statement on protecting customers – SBS News
15. CBA named Roy Morgan’s Most Trusted Bank Brand – Roy Morgan, 2026 awards
16. CBA ranked fourth among Australia’s most trusted brands, behind Bunnings, Aldi and Kmart – Roy Morgan, June 2026
17. Wilkinson Group guiding behaviours – Wilkinson Group