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Hello, and welcome to October’s Reputation Digest, your monthly download on all things reputation – the good and the (mostly) bad.
Boeing still on the rocks
One of the biggest reputation stories of 2024 is the continued plight that Boeing finds itself in. Boeing’s reputation challenges ramped up five years ago when twin crashes caused a global grounding of the 737 Max, which was quickly followed by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was then dialed up further this year when a door blowout on a commercial flight led to a widespread investigation into the safety of Boeing fleets.
Since then, the spiral has only continued, with the company roughly $52 billion in debt and now facing a highly organised, well-funded strike of its production workers. Its workers last went on strike 16 years ago, but the so-called “Fighting Machinists” have now decided the time is right to activate picket lines to secure better pay and benefit terms.
While compensation is a driving force, reporting has also pointed to an organisation that’s lost its way, where long-serving employees argue the company’s culture – one that engendered excellence, innovation and safety-first – has eroded. Once upon a time, even its top executives were intimately familiar with the massive assembly lines there where commercial jets were built. This mentality was felt across the organisation and its external stakeholders, where it came to be known as a staid industrial giant that built the safest and most advanced planes in the sky – “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going”.
That character, and subsequently reputation, has now well and truly gone. Will it be able to get back to its roots and revive itself? Only time will tell.
A win for Man City? How its spin doctors worked their magic
Disclosure: I’m an Arsenal fan, which means I have some skin in the game of Manchester City being obliterated from the Premier League if found guilty of the 115 rules they are deemed to have broken. That being said, I took particular interest in the communications approach that followed the results of its legal battle against the Premier League over what the club deems to be “illegal” Associated Party Transaction (APT) rules.
In short, the APT rules concern how much companies linked to club owners can pay in deals to the team. Any commercial deals entered between clubs and companies linked to their owners need to be of “fair market value.” In other words, what the deal would be worth if the two parties were not linked.
The proceedings were largely completed behind closed doors, so it was only when the news broke that we saw how quickly potentially misleading information can spread and reputations can be shaped. City’s communications team had one clear objective – while it lost on 99% of the claims it brought forward, two counts went in their favor. When the news broke, from looking through X and various news outlets, you’d be quickly under the impression that they had taken down the Premier League and secured a massive victory. Objective shape the narrative had worked.
But as time moved on, and articles started to emerge that cut against this narrative – did City really secure a landmark win? As The Lawyer points out, the reality is a lot more measured. The Premier League clearly won on the majority of points, but it’s not uncommon for claimants like Man City to bring a series of challenges forward, knowing that only some have to stick to get a ‘win’.
The more pressing question is then, why did City bring the challenge? What did it hope to achieve? For example, if City hoped entering into this process would help render the APT rules completely unlawful and so sponsorship deals could be agreed upon without a fair market value assessment, then it probably lost.
Regardless of the motivation, what the case has taught us is that narratives can be shaped fast. The Premier League – already under scrutiny for everything from refereeing standards to club spending breaches – already has an uphill battle to win hearts and minds. Man City’s comms team ceased on this mistrust, while acting fast on their own objectives, and successfully shaped the direction of the narrative.
City are proving to be slick on and off the pitch at the minute, but here’s to hoping the next hearing – the infamous 115 – they won’t have as much to cheer about (from a grisly Arsenal fan).
The Gray cloud hangs over No10
And finally, it’s safe to say that Starmer’s tenure and No10 hasn’t been smooth sailing. As the former MP Penny Mordaunt put it bluntly to sum up his woes – “In a mere 12 weeks he has brought doubt to our economy, fear to our elderly, a touch of the Imelda Marcos to the office of prime minister and sausage memes to our timelines.”
While controversial policy changes and a prospective challenging winter budget have made life hard, it has been the personnel and structure that sits behind the government that is arguably causing the PM’s worst headaches. At the time of writing, Starmer still does not have a national security advisor or a private secretary. But the most damning issue that has played out publicly – a signifier that Downing Street is dysfunctional to its core – has been the departure of Sue Gray.
Little over two weeks after the row over Gray commanding a higher salary than the PM himself, Sue Gray resigned from her post. It seemed to tip confidence (or lack of) in the Starmer government further downward, with approval ratings continuing to plunge.
Since then, the PM has sought to change the narrative, and said he made the five changes to his team to “strengthen his Downing Street operation ahead of marking his first 100 days in office”. Time will tell if this strategy at recovering the reputation of competence Starmer and his team so carefully sought to craft during the election, but some are less optimistic. As The Spectator puts it: “The Tories recognise the signs of political death, and they believe it’s already started to hang over Labour.”
Image: Unsplash / Maxim Ilyahov
