FedEx's Reputation: Its Bottom Line Absolutely Positively Depends on It

 

 

When it comes to global reputation management, FedEx goes to great lengths to mold and shape industry perceptions toward the behaviors and outcomes it wants to achieve. Bill Margaritis, senior vice president for worldwide communications and investor relations, imparted several of the practices behind FedEx’s successful global reputation management strategy.

• A global reputation summit. Roughly 215 people — including his 175-person global corporate communications staff, senior executives, and outside consultants — meet for two-and-a-half days each year to talk about strategies, competitive dynamics, the role of his department in fulfilling the company goals, and how to better execute programs and sharpen skills on such subjects as emerging and socioeconomic trends.

• Internal benchmarks. Margaritis looks mostly inward for best practices to learn from, analyzing what worked well, what needs to be refined, and what hasn’t worked well, then continuously improves. As an example, he’ll look at the firm’s measurement system, its media relations outreach, the way it communicates with employees, the channels it uses, social responsibility investments, its philanthropic strategy, and local market outreach. He questions everything, using a global framework of doing the right things in the right countries.

 

• A marriage between brand and reputation. FedEx sees brand and reputation as two distinct, yet related disciplines. The firm tries to operate complementary programs to align audiences, programs, and channels in a powerful way that tells its story and differentiates the company in both the marketplace and workplace. By having the two areas work closely together, Margaritis feels they produce optimal outcomes that transform attitudes and beliefs about the company and its services.

• Scorecards. Margaritis uses a number of what he calls “public scorecards” to gauge FedEx’s reputation management success, including Fortune’s “Most Admired” list, the annual Harris Interactive Reputation QuotientSM, Fortune’s “Best Places to Work,” the Financial Times list, and similar regional lists like the one in the Far Eastern Economic Review in Asia. He knows, for example, the value of being named to one of these prestigious lists in terms of incremental employment applications received via FedEx’s online recruiting site.

• Dashboards. All of FedEx’s metrics are manually fed into a dashboard of sorts that is tied to siness goals Margaritis’ team reviews quarterly. It is not a business rules or analytics driven piece of software, but rather a compilation of rankings and important data that FedEx deems important, including the Reputation Quotient, the list of “Most Admired Companies,” and the Delahaye Index. A dashboard line item might say, “Moved up on the U.S. list of Most Admired Companies from 6 to 2” and “Moved up on the global list of Most Admired Companies from 8 to 4.” Each number is manually chosen to help the company determine, “Are we up, are we down, why is that, what areas are involved, and what should we do about it?” The answers to these questions influence their programs and the amount of resources put behind them, how they shape their messaging, and how they collaborate and think through strategies.

• Media content analysis. Margaritis divides media coverage into six buckets — vision and leadership, emotional appeal, products and services, citizenship, workplace, and financial performance. Rather than a simple share of voice, he then breaks those areas down into attributes such as favorable vs. unfavorable, reach and impact. He feels it’s important to have diagnostic tools in place that gauge the impact or value his team’s efforts are having on the reputation and says that it is not enough to know how many impressions they got.

 

• Predictive crisis management. How a company handles a crisis is more important in many cases than the crisis itself, Margaritis feels, because the manner in which a company communicates — how fast, how transparent, how committed it is to handling a crisis — speaks volumes about how people judge the firm. Companies must have a well-thought-out preparedness plan. FedEx’s crisis-management program takes vulnerability assessments of issues that may move at a later point to a crisis level. In the world of FedEx, that could be anything from a plane crash to a shipment being lost, a security breach, or a truck seizure.

• A focus on soft values. FedEx believes that approximately 30% of institutional investment decisions are driven by intangibles — non-financial metrics. Things like quality of management, citizenship, vision and leadership, strategy — these are attributes and dimensions of a business that do not necessarily have a specific number associated with them when investors are making decisions. But how effective companies are in communicating those soft, intangible values to the investment community could very much influence their decision. This is a priority for FedEx.

• A highly mobile internal broadcast communications network. FedEx maintains a 1,500-station digital satellite television network in offices and on computer desktops, from which it communicates strategic messages through video-on-demand. It helps the company build a united culture, get a message out quickly, inform and inspire employees, diffuse a situation, and train employees on how to handle any situation that may arise.