Reputation Failures Start With Org Design, Not Communications

Reputation does not live in the communications function. It passes through it. That observation, made by Nathaniel Sillin, Senior Director of Global Corporate Communications and Public Affairs at Gilead Sciences, is the starting point for a rethink of how organizations build standing with regulators, investors, ministers, and journalists.

Writing in PRovoke Media, Sillin argues that most organizations fail at reputation not because their communications teams are weak, but because they have built the wrong structure from the start.

Five Answers, Five Definitions

Sillin offers a simple diagnostic. Ask five senior leaders to define reputation in one sentence. You will get five different answers. Ask who owns it, and you will get five more. That confusion, he says, is not a training problem. It is a design problem.

The first element of good design is clarity about what brand and reputation actually are. The CMO owns brand: the promise the company makes to customers, expressed through identity and experience. The CCO owns reputation: the belief held by regulators, ministers, activists, investors, and journalists who determine whether the company can operate at all. Reputation is earned offstage, over years that outlast most communications plans.

When the Design Worked: Visa and Meeza

Sillin points to a case from his time at Visa. Egypt launched Meeza, a national payment scheme designed to keep domestic transaction revenue inside the country. Visa was not shut out. The outcome was negotiated coexistence. That did not come from a communications campaign. It came from years of financial inclusion work with the Central Bank of Egypt, coordinated across communications, policy, and government affairs. Cross-functional coordination is what kept the door open.

When the Design Failed

Sillin also recounts a failure. He was brought in to build a reputation function from scratch at a company where the product itself was the crisis. His first discovery: no one on the senior team could explain the difference between brand and reputation. The CMO thought she owned reputation. The CCO thought he owned brand. Legal thought both were someone else's problem. Every planning cycle moved work around without fixing the confusion. Nothing done on messaging mattered until the lanes were redesigned.

What CEOs and Boards Should Ask

For CEOs and boards, Sillin's prescription is specific. The reputation function needs its own architecture: dedicated team, dedicated budget, and a coordinating rhythm with legal, policy, government affairs, and investor relations. Adjacent functions need clear handoffs so everyone knows when a matter turns reputational and who leads from that point.

The third requirement is CEO backing. Reputation investments are expensive, slow, and hard to attribute. A CEO will sooner or later want to cut the budget in a difficult quarter. That will kill the function unless the CCO has already built the case. The case is this: reputation is the asset that determines whether the company gets the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong.

The question Sillin suggests every CEO ask their CCO is not about messaging or coverage. It is this: who gives the company the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong, and why? Reputation shows up when a regulator calls for context before sending a subpoena. It shows up when a minister takes a meeting without preconditions. If the answer is vague, the function is under-designed.

For board members, the same question applies to the full leadership team separately. If the answers differ, there is a design problem, not a communications problem.

Brand is expression. Reputation is infrastructure.