Warren Buffett has said that it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy one. The observation is widely quoted. The first half of it, the 20-year timeline, is less commonly examined for its strategic implications. If reputation takes 20 years to build, then organisations managing their brand on a campaign cycle are not building reputation at all. They are generating attention, which is a different asset with a different shelf life, a different conversion rate, and a different relationship to trust. Confusing the two is one of the most consistent and costly mistakes in strategic communications. There is a test worth conducting on any communications programme. Stop it for 90 days. Go quiet across all channels. Publish nothing. Pitch no journalists. Send no newsletters. Hold no events. Then, at the end of those 90 days, assess what remains. The coverage that is still generating enquiries. The conversations that are still happening. The way people in your target market describe your organisation when they have no recent prompt from you to anchor their description. What remains after 90 days of silence is reputation. What disappears within the first two weeks was activity. Most organisations, if they ran this test honestly, would find that far more of what they produce is the second category than the first. The Edelman Trust Barometer’s 20 years of longitudinal data on how trust is built and lost in institutional relationships offers a consistent finding that the communications industry has been slow to operationalise. Trust is not built through single high-impact moments. It is built through the accumulation of repeated, consistent signals over time, across multiple contexts. The 2024 edition found that “sustained, coherent narrative presence” was the single most predictive factor in trust-building across all categories of institution: business, NGO, government, and media. A single powerful campaign can create awareness. It cannot create trust. Trust requires the kind of consistency over time that only a structural commitment to reputation building, rather than episodic communications investment, can produce.
Charles Fombrun, Professor Emeritus at New York University’s Stern School of Business and founder of the Reputation Institute, spent a career building an empirical framework for understanding how reputation is formed and what it is worth commercially.
Charles Fombrun, Professor Emeritus at New York University’s Stern School of Business and founder of the Reputation Institute, spent a career building an empirical framework for understanding how reputation is formed and what it is worth commercially. His foundational work, Reputation: Realizing Value from the Corporate Image, published in 1996 and updated through subsequent research at RepTrak, established that organisational reputation is a composite of multiple dimensions built across multiple stakeholder groups over extended time periods. The RepTrak methodology, which now measures reputation across more than 7,000 companies in 40 countries, consistently finds that the organisations with the strongest reputations are not the ones with the most communications activity. They are the ones with the most coherent, consistent narrative across all stakeholder groups, maintained over the longest unbroken period of engagement. The practical distinction between activity-based and reputation-based communications is visible in how organisations respond to crisis. A company that has invested in building genuine reputation has, in effect, deposited trust with its stakeholders over years. When a crisis arrives, the deposited trust becomes a buffer. Stakeholders who have had consistent, coherent, positive experience with the organisation’s communications are significantly more likely to extend benefit of the doubt, withhold judgement, and wait for the organisation’s response before forming a final view. Research by Reputation Institute found that organisations with strong pre-crisis reputational positions recovered, on average, 2.5 times faster from equivalent crisis events than organisations with weak pre-crisis reputations. The reputation built in the quiet periods before the crisis is the most valuable resource available when the crisis arrives. Activity cannot build it. Only time and consistency can. The organisations that understand this invest differently from the majority. They are not trying to maximise coverage or impressions. They are trying to build a body of thought leadership, demonstrated behaviour, and stakeholder engagement that positions them as the definitive, trusted authority in a specific, precisely defined domain. They are willing to say things that are specific enough to be disagreed with, because the alternative, producing communications that is safe, broadly acceptable, and designed to offend no one, produces content that is universally forgettable. The Edelman Trust data shows that “willingness to take a clear position” is consistently correlated with higher trust scores. Risk aversion in communications does not produce safety. It produces irrelevance, which is a different kind of risk with a longer timeline. Richard Branson built one of the most recognised brand portfolios in the world not through a sophisticated communications apparatus but through a relentlessly consistent personal narrative: the challenger brand, the underdog with ambition, the institution of entrepreneurial optimism. Every Virgin company launch, every Branson public appearance, every interview confirmed and added to the same narrative. When crises came, as they did, the accumulated reputation carried the brand through them in ways that a company with less consistent reputation building behind it would not have survived. The strategy was not a campaign. It was a decade of behavioural and communicative consistency that built a reputational asset that every part of the business could draw on. The payoff for this approach is not immediate, and the absence of immediate payoff is precisely why most organisations do not take it. The pressure to demonstrate quarterly communications value is real, and a multi-year reputation building programme does not generate the kind of attention spikes that appear impressive on a monthly report. But the organisations that have made this investment for three, five, or ten years have something that cannot be bought quickly and cannot be replicated without time: an audience that trusts them before the sales conversation begins; a credibility that makes every other part of the business easier to execute; and a reputational buffer that holds when the difficult moments arrive. The question of how to build this kind of reputation is less mysterious than it is often presented. It is not about budget. The organisations with the most enduring reputations are not always the highest spenders. It is about clarity, consistency, and commitment over time. Clarity about what the organisation stands for and what it is building. Consistency in how that is communicated across every channel, context, and stakeholder interaction. And the commitment to maintain that consistency through the pressures and distractions that cause most organisations to fragment their narrative in pursuit of short-term attention. These are not expensive capabilities. They are demanding ones. And the organisations that develop them do not just build better communications. They build a more durable business. Buffett was right. Reputation takes 20 years to build. That is not a discouraging timeline. It is an instruction. The organisations that start now, build clearly, and maintain consistency have a 20-year head start on every competitor that waits until the next campaign cycle to begin. The question is not whether the work is worth doing. It is whether you are willing to measure progress in years rather than quarters. The specific mechanism through which consistent reputation building creates the crisis buffer that Buffett described is worth examining in detail, because it is not intuitive from the outside. The buffer works because trust, once genuinely established through sustained and coherent narrative, creates what behavioural economists call “attribution bias”: the tendency of people who trust a source to interpret ambiguous new information in the most favourable direction available. A company with a strong, consistently demonstrated reputation for integrity is not given a pass on genuine wrongdoing. But in the ambiguous early stages of a crisis, before the facts are clear and the response is known, the audience who has built up a body of trust in that organisation will apply a significantly more charitable interpretation than they would apply to an organisation about which they have no strong prior view. The trust, in other words, becomes a cognitive resource that the audience applies on the organisation’s behalf without being asked to. The coherence requirement in reputation building is more demanding than most organisations appreciate. Coherence does not mean repetition. It does not mean saying the same thing in every communication. It means that every communication, regardless of channel, format, or audience, reflects a consistent underlying set of values, beliefs, and positions. An organisation can be innovative, varied, and contextually adapted in its communications while remaining deeply coherent at the level of what it fundamentally stands for. The failure mode is not variation. It is inconsistency: the organisation that presents one set of values in its external communications and another in its behaviour, or that adopts positions in its content that are not reflected in its organisational decisions. Audiences, particularly sophisticated ones, are extremely good at detecting this kind of inconsistency. When they detect it, the trust that was being built deflates rapidly, because what they discover is not a gap in messaging but a gap in character. Measuring reputation progress is one of the aspects of reputation building most frequently cited as a reason for not investing in it. If we cannot measure it clearly, the argument goes, how do we justify the spend? This framing misunderstands the nature of reputation as an asset. Reputation is not unmeasurable. It is measurably present in how consistently and accurately target audiences can articulate what an organisation stands for, in the quality and nature of the inbound opportunities the organisation receives without actively pursuing them, in the degree to which the organisation is cited and referenced in conversations and contexts it does not control, and in the length of time its relationships with clients, partners, and staff endure. None of these are perfect metrics. All of them are directionally informative. Organisations that track them over multi-year periods consistently find that investment in reputation building produces compounding returns that campaign-based communications does not approach. The organisations that have most successfully built reputational assets in their sectors share a practice that is deceptively simple but consistently difficult to maintain: they publish and communicate in a way that is driven by what they actually think rather than by what they believe their audience wants to hear. The temptation in any communications programme is to optimise for approval: to say the things that generate positive responses, to avoid the positions that generate disagreement, and to present the organisation in the most universally appealing possible light. This approach is not dishonest. But it produces communications that is, over time, increasingly indistinguishable from every other organisation in the category. The organisations that build distinctive, durable reputations do the harder thing: they say what they actually believe, take positions that are specific enough to be disagreed with, and accept that building a strong reputation with the right audiences requires, by definition, being less appealing to the wrong ones.
