What is a good reputation management strategy?

A good reputation management strategy is how you protect your reputation before pressure arrives. Not once a crisis forces the question.

Most guides start with the crisis and work backwards. Wrong order. By the time reputation is “under threat,” the options have already narrowed.

A reputation management strategy is a discipline. Not a campaign with a start and end date.

It assumes pressure is coming, because it always does. Build early and you have somewhere to stand. Build late and it has a different name: damage control.

Optus found this out the hard way. March 2026: Roy Morgan names it Australia’s most distrusted brand, overtaking Woolworths Roy Morgan.

June 2026: same spot, second straight quarter, ahead of Facebook, Temu, Woolworths and Coles Roy Morgan.

The trigger was the September 18, 2025 Triple Zero outage. Thirteen hours. Four deaths ABC News.

But the damage was already banked. A 2022 data breach, a 2023 outage. The outage didn’t create the distrust. It exposed it.

That is what a real reputation management strategy plans against: damage that builds quietly, then breaks open all at once.

Three jobs. Most organisations do one of them well.

Building

Earn trust through behaviour people can verify. Not a campaign layered on top.

Bunnings: eleven straight quarters at the top of Roy Morgan’s trust rankings Roy Morgan. No clever ad got it there. Same pattern everywhere. Trust breaks down in a predictable order, whether it’s a telco or a Big Four firm.

Protecting

Know your exposure before it becomes an event. Have the response ready before anyone needs it.

Optus’s network reliability was never a secret. It sat in trade press and regulator letters for years before it became a fatal national story. A working issues management practice catches that pattern early. Allens missed the same signal: a problem visible long before it became a crisis.

Recovering

Acknowledge honestly. Change visibly. Stay consistent for years, not news cycles.

Commonwealth Bank did it: rebuilt into Roy Morgan’s top five, a record fourth place by early 2026 Roy Morgan. No single campaign. Just consistency, sustained. KPMG shows the opposite: an apology that undercuts itself while it’s being delivered.

Weak: “We want to be seen as a trusted, ethical organisation that puts people first.”

Strong: “We will publish our safety numbers against target, every quarter, unedited, before a journalist asks.”

Only one of those can be checked. I’ve used a simple formula for years: trust equals truth, transparency, traceability. A promise nobody can trace is not a strategy. It’s a hope.

• The board must ensure exposure is a standing agenda item, not an annual mention.
• The CEO must establish one accountable owner, with authority to speak in the first hour.
• Corporate affairs must protect the gap between what was said and what was done from growing.
• General counsel must prevent legal caution from stripping the humanity out of a statement.

Corporate affairs sits closer to governance than advertising. That’s where most strategies quietly fail.

A tactic is one action. A strategy is the same judgement, applied before, during and after.

Optus’s “We’re On It” campaign, May 2026, full-page letters signed by CEO Stephen Rue, was a tactic LBB Online. Eight months late, it read like damage control, not leadership.

What was missing was continuity: one adviser across building, protecting and recovering, not one brought in after the story broke. That’s what crisis communications counsel is actually for.

No large department required. Just clear ownership, run all the time, not just mid-crisis.

Building: quarterly. A number tracked, a promise published, a gap closed. Protecting: a standing issues register, reviewed at board level. Recovering: measured in years.

A retained relationship, the kind Wilkinson Confidante offers, puts the same adviser in the room before, during and after.

A framework won’t fix a genuine cultural problem. It won’t rescue a company that keeps making the same mistake in public.

What it removes is the excuse of surprise.

• Building. Earn trust through behaviour people can verify.
• Protecting. Map exposure, have the response ready.
• Recovering. Acknowledge honestly. Change visibly. Stay consistent.

That’s also the honest answer to how to keep a good reputation. Not a campaign. The same unremarkable decision, repeated, every quarter, for years.

I’ve spent 24 years watching this cycle, first as a journalist, since as the adviser on the other side of the table.

The companies still standing after the next crisis are the ones that started building before anyone was watching.