Ask most boards how they manage reputation and you will hear about campaigns: a refreshed brand, a purpose statement, a crisis playbook, a media trainer on retainer. Reputation, in this telling, is something you produce, like an annual report.
We think that has it backwards. Reputation is produced by decisions, often made years earlier, in budget meetings and engineering reviews that nobody outside the building ever sees. The campaign tells the public what to expect. The decisions tell them what is true.
A slogan against a refinery
In July 2000, BP replaced its old logo with a green, white and yellow sunburst and a new line: "beyond petroleum." It was a serious, expensive attempt to tell the world that an oil company was becoming an energy company.
Now look at what was happening underneath. After BP acquired Amoco, its group chief executive ordered a 25% cut in fixed spending across its refineries. In 2004, refineries were asked to cut another 25%. On 23 March 2005, the Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 people and injuring 180. The US Chemical Safety Board concluded that "organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation" caused the disaster, and found that cost considerations had discouraged the refinery from replacing equipment with a flare system that would likely have prevented it, or greatly reduced its severity.
Five years later, on 20 April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven workers died. Oil gushed for 87 days. About six weeks in, BP’s chief executive Tony Hayward said "I’d like my life back," and then had to apologise to the families of the eleven men for saying it. By 2018, BP’s bill for the spill had reached about $65 billion, more than the $61.6 billion it had estimated only two years earlier.
The slogan did not fail. The decisions beneath it did, and the slogan simply made the gap easier to see.
What the audience already assumes
You might still believe a good story can carry a company through. Look at who is listening. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, drawn from nearly 34,000 respondents in 28 countries, found that 64% trust business. That beats government at 53%, but it still means more than one in three people start from distrust. Nearly seven in ten fear that institutional leaders are deliberately misleading the public. And 42% say they are unwilling to invest in companies that do not share their values.
So your message lands on an audience that has already half decided you might be lying. What persuades people like that? Not adjectives. Evidence. And the only evidence they accept is what you do when it costs you something.
What Johnson & Johnson decided
On 29 September 1982, a 12-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman died in a Chicago suburb after taking cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol. Six more people in the Chicago area died in the days that followed. Johnson & Johnson had not poisoned anyone. On 5 October it recalled 31 million bottles nationwide anyway, with a retail value of $100 million (about $307 million in 2022 dollars). Tylenol’s share of the painkiller market fell from 37% to 7%.
Forty-three days after the first death, J&J unveiled triple-sealed, tamper-resistant packaging. A year later, Tylenol was back to 30% of the market.
Was that a communications triumph? It is usually taught as one. But the communications were the easy part. The hard part was a decision to put customers ahead of revenue, and that decision was not invented in 1982. Robert Wood Johnson had written it into the company’s Credo in 1943, naming patients, doctors and nurses as the first responsibility and stockholders as the final one. The recall was simply the Credo, applied under pressure.
Thirty-nine years of saying it, and then one week to prove it.
When the product is the problem
Volkswagen spent years selling "Clean Diesel." The US Federal Trade Commission later alleged that the campaign, run from 2008 to 2015, deceived buyers while the cars produced up to 4,000% more nitrogen oxides than the legal limit. On 18 September 2015, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced its notice of violation. Volkswagen acknowledged discrepancies between test and road figures in around 11 million vehicles worldwide fitted with its EA 189 diesel engine. By early 2020, fines and other expenses had reached about €30 billion, more than $32 billion.
Here the campaign depended on the decision itself: software built to pass a test rather than to clean the air. No crisis plan can repair that, because there is nothing underneath to repair.
Boeing and the cost of old decisions
Lion Air Flight 610 crashed in October 2018, killing 189 people. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed in March 2019, killing 157. The 737 MAX was grounded for 20 months, and Boeing’s own direct costs came to about $20 billion. By mid-November 2020, customers had cancelled 448 orders for the plane that year alone. In January 2021, the US Department of Justice charged Boeing with conspiracy to defraud the United States and reached a $2.5 billion agreement: a $243.6 million criminal penalty, $1.77 billion for airline customers and $500 million for the beneficiaries of the 346 people who died. Boeing’s employees, the department said, had "chose[n] the path of profit over candor."
That should have been the end of it. Then, in January 2024, a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 as it climbed out of Portland, Oregon. The National Transportation Safety Board’s final report, released in July 2025, found that four bolts meant to secure the plug were missing before the plane was ever delivered, and blamed Boeing’s failure to follow proper manufacturing procedures.
What campaign could have prevented that headline? None. The headline was written on a factory floor, long before anyone in communications heard about it.
Where reputation work begins
This is why we start reputation work at Exalt Strategies with the decision record, not the message. Which budget cut has nobody assessed for safety? Which claim in your marketing depends on a test rather than on reality? Which commitment would you abandon the moment it became expensive? Those are communications questions, even if they do not look like it, because they decide what you will have to say later, and whether anyone will believe you when you say it.
None of this makes communications less important. It makes it honest. A good adviser’s job is to tell you, before the journalist does, which of your decisions will become your story.
A campaign can tell people who you want to be. Your decisions tell them who you are, and they will believe the second every time.
Reputation is what is left when the campaign ends.
