It’s essential for a company to think about its reputation. And this reputation is essentially built by our customers. Sometimes, all it takes is one bad experience, poor value for money and under-performing after-sales service to break the bond of trust and damage a company’s reputation.
Reputations can also be eroded by incidents within the company itself or in its supply chain: industrial disasters, water or air pollution, occupational health and safety failures, and so on. The purchasing department must be vigilant in its choice of suppliers, because if one of them doesn’t have a good reputation, this can reflect on the company itself. Sometimes to the point of boycotting its products!
The best example of this is the textile industry: several Western ready-to-wear brands suffered severely from the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013, when a building housing garment factories collapsed in Bangladesh, killing more than a thousand workers in precarious conditions.
New digital practices (distance selling, online reviews, social networks, use of personal data, etc.) have reinforced the need for vigilance: one bad experience, and the “bad buzz” spreads on social networks like wildfire. In addition to your reputation, you need to keep an eye on your e-reputation. All this constitutes an image risk.
