What is Reputation?

In today’s online environment, reputation is more important, pervasive, unforgettable, and meaningful than ever. It’s surprisingly easy to neglect, abuse, reject, or even intentionally shred someone’s reputation. Building, sustaining, and protecting corporate or personal reputations can be difficult. Reputation damage can happen in minutes, doesn’t need to be based on fact,  and the blast radius of a reputation scandal can circle the globe within hours. Reputation is important because it can influence how others perceive and interact with an individual or entity. It can also impact an individual’s or entity’s success or opportunities. Whereas reputation “management” is the practice of altering and improving how reputation is perceived.

It’s tempting to think that we control our reputations — that we get to define what people think of us and how they respond. And that’s true to a degree. We control one aspect of our reputation, but holistically, reputation is not just who we are or what we do; it’s what people think of who we are and do. 

There is a difference between character and reputation. Only the first one can be controlled entirely.

A person or company’s reputation does not depend solely upon what that person or company does. It depends on the person who is perceiving that reputation. In other words, a reputation is an opinion. 

You may have read the quote by Jack Milner, “A man’s reputation is the opinion people have of him; his character is what he is.” 

“A man’s reputation is the opinion people have of him; his character is what he really is.” 

Although Milner’s quote is intended to amplify the importance of one’s character, it still leaves the uncomfortable truth to be reckoned with: your reputation is at the mercy of other people’s opinions. 

It’s important to note that reputation and character are different. The “repute” of an entity (person or thing) is the estimation of how a person or community feels (their sentiment) about a person’s character. Character is a combination of actual traits the entity bears.

Opinions, like many beliefs, are not based on fact. They are, instead, based on feelings, past experiences, cognitive biases, physical well-being, the weather, and whether or not someone has had their morning cup of coffee. 

There may be objective facts about you as a person, company, or brand. For example, you are a female. Your company has 18 employees. Your brand logo is a buffalo. Whatever. But those objective facts are not your brand reputation. Reputation goes beyond objectivity into the murky, unpredictable, volatile, and phantasmagoric dimension of subjectivity. 

Because this is true — that reputation is more than our identity or actions — we must admit that some aspects of reputation are beyond our control.