Brand and reputation—it’s what your company is built on. It’s what your customers base their loyalty on. It’s the culmination of everything your company does, from product quality to employee behavior and everything in between. It takes a lifetime to build, but only an instant to be torn apart. So what can you do about it? When it comes to your reputation, perception is reality. To effectively promote, protect, and preserve your brand and reputation, it must be managed programmatically with ownership and accountability residing in the C-suite. And it is critical for leaders to keep the brand out in front of everything their company does.

Brand Reputation is a discipline separate from that of traditional branding campaigns. Brand Reputation recognizes that due to increased transparency and access to information, ‘traditional branding’ whether through mission statements, marketing or affiliations can easily be verified and evaluated. Thus reputation plays an increasing role in keeping organizations honest and forcing them to take definitive actions, rather than simply making public statements. Both consumers and employees are getting into the game.

Brand Reputation is sort of like ‘Brands 2.0.’ Until recently brands had largely been considered ‘intangible’ concepts. Accounting contributed to this conception by identifying ‘goodwill’ as the excess over the book value one company was willing to pay for another. That excess was brand value.

Times have changed. More than ever before brands are increasingly the key element of any business model. Much of this power is because people view brands as a means of personal identification. Brands now trump actual products in terms of importance. For example, Abercrombie & Fitch used targeted branding and outreach to drive incredible revenues despite its products being of questionable quality. Brands now must interact with an audience, as explained by the brothers Heath in ‘Made to Stick.

Another shift has been organizations coming to embrace themselves as brands. For example, the university one attends, or the organizations one affiliates are increasingly recognizable and monetizable. Knowing that someone attended a certain college, or is affiliated with certain brands conveys all sorts of ethnic and class related information. Globalization has further complicated branding due to differences in cultural and geographic interpretations.

Still, the primary catalyst for these changes is the ever increasing prominence of the internet. As consumers have been given greater access to information they have become empowered (better informed) to decide how and where they spend their money. This empowerment has resulted in creating greater accountability on the part of businesses and organizations alike. Even Congress and international legislators have begun to demand increased accountability and sustainable practices partially as a result of online advocacy and scorecard groups who have now found an audience.