From the time of the pioneering work by Fombrun and others in the 1990's, market observers generally agreed that reputation was a source of equity value. When good, it drove customers to buy more at higher prices, employees to work harder for less, vendor and creditors to offer superior terms, equity investors to bid up multiples, and regulators to cast a more benign eye. Since then, punters have sought methods for linking to concepts into an equity strategy.

The dominant challenge has been the inherent nature of reputation. It is an epiphenomenon of the interplay between culture and operational matters on one hand, oversight and governance practices on the second, and allowing for a third hand -- how the package is presented and delivered to stakeholders. The latter is recognized as being generally in the domain of marketers, and since it represents the "last mile" to the stakeholder, it has received the lion's share of attention.

Reputation value can be teased out of equity value through major adverse reputational events. Many have been documented in this blog over the years. Informal estimates suggest that the cost of an adverse reputational event is around 5% of market cap. Steel City Re, the reputation risk insurance specialist, calculate a value closer to 7% but their model arguably ignores "lesser" reputational events. Since 2005 when the Economist Intelligence Unit published its seminal article on reputation risk, reputation management gained a new internal stakeholder - the enterprise risk manager.

These data affirmed management's need to avoid reputational risk, but they provided little in the way of guidance of how to avoid it. Also, while they suggested how much to invest in the avoidance effort, the lumpy nature of reputational events ensured that any classical actuarial model would leave a firm statistically comfortable with its risk management strategy and yet woefully underprepared.

In November 2011, Steel City Re announced that its data on reputational value indicators had been incorporated into an equity strategy and was available through Dow Jones Indexes. The ten-year history, several years of which have been published weekly on this site, indicated a significant outperformance relative to the benchmark S&P500 index. Critics suggested that the outperformance could be attributed to higher beta securities rather than an inherent value proposition associated with exploiting latent reputation value.

We now report an additional analysis of the RepuStars algorithm in which the stock selection was limited to the S&P500 constituent members only. Details on the 3-year old RepuStars Variety algorithm and the underpinning reputational statistics are provided elsewhere. In this study, stocks were selected by the algorithm at the beginning of each of ten years beginning December 2001. In general, the portfolios comprising stocks selected using the RepuStars Variety algorithm outperformed the universe of S&P500 firms (the Index) each of the ten years. The single exception was 2008 (image below). The ten year average was 6.5%, a value surprisingly similar to the 7% losses realized with adverse reputational events.


From an investment perspective, the portfolio based on the above would have produced an annual 9% cumulative return which is within 10% of the RepuStars Variety price index returns that are reported each Monday (image below).


The upshot is the reputation management is not only good risk management. It is a source of value creation. Firms that do it right can expect, on average, an additional 6.5% in equity value growth, and protection against 7% in equity value loss, all other things being equal. Arguably, there are very few managerial strategies a firm can pursue today short of inventing the next i-device or replacement for facebook that can deliver such value.