Stephen Thomas started his career in corporate affairs more than 25 years ago with Burson-Marsteller in Melbourne and then Hong Kong. He went on to become a Managing Director and Head of Corporate Affairs, China for Citigroup before spending nine years as Head of Group Brand and Communications in Hong Kong for AIA Group. In 2022, he launched Hong Kong-based TAVO Advisory, and this week published his first book, “Reputations of Value - winning with Corporate Reputations in an unpredictable world”.

Stephen, you have just launched your first book, Reputations of Value. Before we get into the detail of the book, what led you to write it and who is it pitched at?
On a personal level, I wanted to attempt to capture some aspects of my professional life, particularly given it seems difficult to explain to my family and friends what I actually do for a living! I also do not pretend to have all the answers and wanted to learn more myself. That’s why I had conversations with brilliant people around the world, to capture their insights. I was fortunate to be able to speak with subject-matter experts both in Asia and the West.

I also wanted the book to be helpful to others working in this area. As practitioners go through their careers, it’s normal that they will be exposed to some areas more than others. So, you might be used to doing media relations, but not so much around employee communications. Or you might be someone who has done a lot of employee comms, but less so on CEO profiling. And as your career continues, you might be expected to know something about, for example, transaction communications or litigation communications, but you need some help. I hope the book provides a jumping off point in this regard.

In short, the book is relevant to anyone who works in the field of helping companies earn and protect their reputations. The target reader includes consultants and in-house practitioners as well as C-suite executives, because this subject matter has become an area that any serious businessperson needs to understand.

The book starts with an unexpected discussion, reflected in the deliberately chosen title - “Reputations”, plural. What do you mean by that?
At the outset, I wanted to use the plural when talking about reputation. Broadly speaking, a company may want one overall reputation that captures what it’s all about. However, in reality companies have a range of reputations with different stakeholders and the value of these reputations will ebb and flow in importance over time.

Different stakeholders will have varying views of a particular company and in fact, even the same stakeholders often have differing perceptions. For example, if you are a western multinational, what your customers think of you in Mainland China may well be very different to your customers in the U.S. Or even employees in one part of the company might have a different perception of the company compared to those in another department. This multi-dimensional nature to reputation was something I wanted to highlight, because it has implications for the priorities of the corporate affairs team, the trade-offs the company needs to make, and also the importance of data and insight to keep abreast of shifting viewpoints over time.

In the second part of the book, focused on earning corporate reputations, you have chapters devoted to a range of challenges and issues, emerging and established, that help or hinder earning reputations, including employee communications, the CEO as Chief Communicator, and - close to Telum Media’s heart - the art of media relations. You also dive into a very hot topic, “Purpose”. Can you give us a summary of that?
Earning positive reputations provides the foundation for competitive advantage - to win in business. And the risk of damage to corporate reputations threatens any firm’s ability to operate and even exist. It is also worth noting that earning a desired reputation is about more than the act of communications. Rather, it is the product or service the company provides. It’s how the company operates, how it cares for its employees and customers, and how it coalesces around its reason for being. And it’s the ability of the company to deliver results that underpin its growth and success. Woven through all of that is communications with a wide range of stakeholders, including media relations, which remains a key component of any company’s public profile.

Corporate purpose is not a new phenomenon, but it has become very intertwined with corporate reputations, as it should guide the actions and decisions the company makes. Companies need to take care with how they talk about their purpose to avoid it coming over as trite or superficial. But done well, purpose can have a galvanising effect that enables the company to stay focused on why and how it operates the way it does over time.

The third section of the book delves into protecting corporate reputations. What are the key areas as you see them?
One of the most sought-after skills in the corporate affairs arena is the ability to prepare for and manage, to the degree possible, reputational risk. Threats to corporate reputations have expanded in their nature as well as their power to cause material damage to the business. One of the most topical of these threats is cybersecurity, which is why I focused much of the Crisis chapter on this type of crisis. A cybersecurity crisis can generate enormous trust issues between a company and its stakeholders. It must be responded to in the face of uncertainties about what has actually happened and who is impacted, and it is all happening under intense scrutiny from your stakeholders. Other areas the book covers include how to support litigation the company might be involved in, the impact of geopolitical risk, which is a high priority for multinationals and also M&A, which can boost reputation but can also damage it greatly if things go wrong.

The last section of the book looks at measurement. Measuring outputs is easy enough, but measuring and tracking reputation has been something of a holy grail for some time. The book is full of both Principles and Practical Tips sections - do you also map out a path for measurement?
It is extremely difficult to quantify efforts to earn reputation and yet this is a key factor in taking a seat at the table among the senior leadership team - for all other parts of the business, there are well-defined frameworks in place to gauge progress. For corporate affairs, traditionally, this is not something done well. I was fortunate to be able to capture the wisdom of Jim Macnamara, a leading authority in this area. Using a ‘measurement, evaluation, learn’ model is a useful framework that allows a more informed approach to not only understanding how things have tracked in the past, but also to provide a means of improving the program in the future. For those struggling with the measurement of communications programs, Jim offered some practical advice: start small with pilot projects or trials; use low-cost methods and tools; and prioritise what you want to measure. To sum up, measurement is fundamentally important for a number of reasons, not least being that if you cannot measure efforts to improve the reputations your company is striving to earn, corporate affairs will struggle to be seen as a value centre.

Find out more about Stephen's book here.