Close-Up: Viewpoint - Why brands will live and die by their reputation.(Viewpoint essay)

The power of brand marketing now rests in the hands of consumers and clients must respect them.

Brand reputation is headline news this week, last week and I guarantee every week this year. Did Channel 4 handle media interest as well as it might? More importantly, did it allow one of its products, Big Brother, to wag the dog? Charles Dunstone did exactly the right thing to pull sponsorship of Big Brother: discuss. The whole population has a view on these matters.

Ask someone in advertising about the value of advertising (beyond sales) and they'll answer along the lines of 'brand value'; ask someone in PR about the ultimate value of PR and they will answer 'reputation'.

In our modern, communication-driven world, brand management and reputation management need to work together in a new way and to some new guidelines.

A revolution is upon us, driven by the internet and the social impact it has helped create. In a world in which people trust people like themselves more than sources of authority; in which points of shared interest are being connected through millions of online forums; in which transparency is a fact of life and in which we are moving from a 'download' mentality to an 'upload' mindset, our approach to brand communications needs to change accordingly. The furore around Big Brother illustrates this.

The Wikipedia consensus has reputation as 'the general opinion of the public toward a person, a group of people or an organisation'. So reputation is a social phenomenon driven by the rise of social media.

The most evocative description I have heard is simply that 'reputation is what people say about you once you're not in the room'.