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Hello, and welcome to November’s Reputation Digest, your monthly download on all things reputation – the good and the (mostly) bad.
Trump’s broad coalition
It would be remiss of me to not start with the major event of the past month: the U.S. Presidential election. The polls had it neck-and-neck until the day itself, but the eventual reality was a pretty sweeping victory for President-elect Trump. He even managed a much-desired trifecta: Presidency with a Republican House and Senate – and with the Supreme Court more right-leaning than ever before, his ability to execute his agenda is about as promising as any incoming president can hope for.
But one of the more interesting takeaways comes from the question of how Trump won. Grounded on hammering home an authoritarian agenda – think mass deportations, gutting a “corrupt” justice system – it seemed Trump’s goal was to “max out the men and hold the women”. But the end result would suggest the Trump campaign was able to craft a much broader and more diverse coalition than first expected. For example, large numbers of blue-collar Latinos and some Black men, long a core part of the Democratic base, opted for red over blue.
Was this a product of the Trump campaign’s strategy, or a failure on the part of Democrats? The answer is probably a mixture of both, but I’ve fallen on the side that it was mostly a Democrat failure. Sure, Trump was always going to be able to max out the male vote and 2024 has been a particularly challenging electoral cycle for incumbents. But the very fact that a candidate with two impeachments, the riot at the Capitol, and felony convictions attached to his name was able to chomp into core parts of the Democratic base is a catastrophic failure in Democrat strategy and communications.
The immediate post-mortem among party moderates has sought to blame the defeat on Harris’ erosion with non-college-educated and lower-income voters. In their view, the party they say has drifted too far to the left, arguing that its association with immigration reform, transgender rights, and abortion access crippled them in swing areas. But the challenges facing the Democrat strategy and communications run much deeper than this. In an excellent thread on X (formerly Twitter), Luke Tryl looks at how issues relating to tone and framing are limiting the Democratic ability to marry a progressive agenda with building a bigger tent.
The Democrats and going to have to do some pretty deep soul searching over the next four years, but effectively diagnosing how and why much of their core base abandoned them on polling day – and how to win them back – would be a start.
Green shoots for the CBI?
The spiral the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) found itself in last year was arguably the most noteworthy corporate crisis of 2023. First revealed by The Guardian, the organization that represents the best of British business found itself facing multiple claims of sexual misconduct and toxic culture. As a result, everyone from BT to PwC to John Lewis had either paused their engagement with the employers’ organization or cancelled their membership altogether.
The following months were filled with almost identical sentiments: “The CBI feels like an organization whose time is up”, “the CBI brand is broken ‘beyond repair”, and much more to the same effect. With the lobbying group on the verge of financial bankruptcy in the months following, it certainly looked to be heading one way.
However, while financial uncertainty still lingers, a case could be put forward that there are green shoots for the recovery of the CBIs reputation. Last month, KPMG and Natwest opted to resume their engagements, which followed AstraZeneca, Unilever, and GSK as other large corporates that have renewed membership. Driven largely by some early confidence in a three-year strategy plan “charting a course” back to profitability, the CBIs focus on transparently reforming its governance and culture seems to be earning back some of its key supporter base.
Only time will tell if confidence and influence can get back to where it once was, but it’s clear that the CBI isn’t quite a brand that’s “beyond repair”.
Is Boeing back on the runway?
In October’s Digest, we touched on one of the major crisis stories of the moment: Boeing. Since then, the impasse with Boeing workers’ pay that was costing the organization $50m per day has been resolved. After emphatically rejecting multiple offers, the “Fighting Machinists” were able to secure a 38% pay rise which looks set to turn the conveyor belt of jet production back on.
The news followed an excellent Big Read in the Financial Times that is worth highlighting, as it looks at the simple question: can Boeing be fixed?
It’s now a consensus that if Kelly Ortberg – the firm’s new CEO – can’t turn the tide, then nobody can. Ortberg’s first task has been to live and breathe a new corporate culture – “it must be more than the poster on the wall”. For example, a major step has been to move himself from Florida to Seattle to be closer to the factory floors in Washington State, something that his predecessors had neglected.
In the world of reputation management, it’s now widely accepted that as companies and cultures become more visible, the behavior, values, and expertise of its people are central to how it is perceived by all. As a result, strategies for communication, action, and advocacy must be built from within, as well as with external forces in mind.
Ortberg’s first steps seem to have adopted these ideas as central pillars, but we’ll have to wait and see if he’s able to win back hearts and minds. Resolving his worker’s pay and getting the supply chain moving again is a good start.
Image: Unsplash / Christina @ wocintechchat.com
