Reputation under pressure, high risk season opens

There is the playing field where thousands of eyes, lights, expectations pour in. And there is the dressing room, that backstage area that eludes most but where strategies are defined. Between these two spaces people at work with different skills and responsibilities. Achain to be presided over, also on a reputational level. Because after all, behind every champion there is an ecosystem of professionals that cannot be seen. This is the meaning of the new campaign 'Champions behind the champions', launched on the South African market by Carling Beer, one of the world's best-selling beer brands owned by the giant Molson Coors Beverage, a major player with an annual turnover of 11 billion dollars and 18,000 employees. The commercial reverses the perspective because it does not tell the story of the champions, but of those who make their victory possible, showing what lies behind the performance. Thus a wider game is played. The campaign intercepts the systemic value and weight of reputation, which is no longer built on product or visibility alone but on the ability to activate and hold together a network of stakeholders.

In short, it is win or lose along the whole supply chain that is under pressure at this historical stage. Financial pessimism - i.e. how worried consumers are about their dwindling purchasing power - rose by 10% from 20% to 30% in the first quarter of the year in Italia. The snapshot monitors the top 40 companies listed on the FTSE Mib of the Italian stock exchange. Thus reputation becomes an increasingly volatile asset: only three out of four countries in the world show a positive balance on economic trust, while Italy ranks tenth, a sign of a widespread climate of uncertainty among stakeholders. This is what the Stakeholder Intelligence Report by Group Caliber, previewed inIl Sole 24 Ore, reports.

The research analyses reputational perceptions in 37 countries worldwide, involving more than 450,000 stakeholders for more than one million evaluations in different economic and geographical contexts. In recent years, reputation lost or gained is weighed in economic value. According to KPMG, it is estimated to be around 30% of an organisation's market value, weighing in at around $13.8 trillion for Echo Research in 2025 alone among the 500 companies on the major US Standard & Poor's stock index. The game is global and systemic. From the supply chain to data management to point-of-sale behaviour: in the most notorious cases, reputational risk arises within the supply chain and is amplified when control of thenarrative is lost.

Volkswagen's Dieselgate started in the technical and regulatory chain, generating one of the biggest industry reputational crises with billion-dollar impacts. Starbucks faced backlash related to incidents in its shops, showing how reputation plays out in the local experience and network behaviour. United Airlines suffered more reputational crises due to incidents involving its passengers, amplified by digital stakeholders. But what is referred to as stakeholder anxiety has deep roots because collective emotions directly influence economic behaviour. Everyone is at risk tone-deaf: here we refer to the danger of a brand communicating out of tune with the context of its stakeholders. A company talks, but does not listen to what people are experiencing. After all, stakeholder anxiety starts andis reinforced by the climate of uncertainty.

"This distance between what is real and what is told grows when communication ignores this picture of instability. More than sectors, vulnerability counts: companies with a high notoriety-familiarity gap are more exposed to risk, because perception is determined by what is told by third-party sources such as media, markets and analysts," says Michele Tesoro-Tess, Ceo Med Region of Group Caliber. According to the report, there is a need to shift reputation from a defensive to a business lever. "In the current context of permanent crisis, the challenge will be to capture reputational fluctuations in real time in order to understand how reputational assets vary with the systemic shocks to which companies are continuously exposed. Our report shows that real time is no longer an option: today it is necessary to know how perceptions evolve in order to anticipate and be ready to manage the continuous shocks to which we are exposed. The evolution is the ability to bring together the immediacy of social media listening and the accuracy of regular market research,' Tesoro-Tess points out.