The largest asset you never booked, and never staffed.
Roughly a quarter of public-market value now sits in reputation. It is carried on no balance sheet, insured by no policy, and in most organizations it is owned by no one in particular — until the week it is destroyed. Here is what the research says about the cost of that gap, and what I’m brought in to close.
Reputation is already a financial position. It just isn’t reported like one.
Valuation research has moved reputation out of the soft-metric column. These are shareholder-value figures, not brand-sentiment scores.
Share of total S&P 500 market capitalization attributable to corporate reputation.
UK Reputation Valuation Report, 2025
Equivalent share of FTSE 350 market capitalization — up £11 billion year over year.
UK Reputation Valuation Report, 2025
Portion of company market value that global executives themselves attribute to reputation.
Weber Shandwick
Estimated scale of the global “reputation economy” — the additional shareholder returns strong reputation generates each year across public companies.
Burson, 2025
Leaders know the risk is there. Few can size it, and fewer still are staffed for it.
Across four independent global surveys, the same pattern repeats: high confidence, thin foundations.
Of organizations actively quantify their exposure to their own top-ten risks. For cyberattack — ranked the number-one risk three years running — it drops to 13%.
Aon Global Risk Management Survey, 2025 · ~3,000 leaders, 63 countries
Average distance between the share of CEOs worried about a risk’s earnings impact and the share who believe they are genuinely prepared for it. The gap holds consistently across twelve global reports.
FleishmanHillard
Of executives consider their communications and public affairs function well-equipped for the current operating environment. Confidence falls further at companies over 50,000 employees.
Weber Shandwick
Have already absorbed at least one serious disruption beyond the pandemic — an average of 3.5 in two years. Yet only about a third report having the foundational elements of resilience in place.
PwC Global Crisis and Resilience Survey · 1,812 leaders, 42 countries
It doesn’t go wrong for a news cycle. It goes wrong for fourteen months.
Share price after a major reputational crisis
The average major reputational crisis takes more than a third off the share price and two thirds off earnings per share. Getting back to where you started takes, on average, 427 days — and for close to a third of affected companies, it hasn’t happened at all.
Rise in social-engineering and fraud claims linked to AI deepfakes, alongside a 53% year-over-year increase in social-engineering incidents. Average cost of a single data breach: $4.88 million.
Aon Cyber Risk Report, 2025
Of the world’s most senior corporate affairs leaders rate their organization’s AI governance as adequate — while enterprise AI spending runs to roughly $40 billion.
Ipsos Reputation Council, 2025
Global employee engagement — the lowest reading since the pandemic and a second straight annual decline. Estimated cost of disengagement to the world economy: $10 trillion a year. Internal audiences are now the first place a crisis leaks.
Gallup, 2026
Of people describe themselves as hesitant or unwilling to engage with those who differ from them; only 10% believe their country shares common values. Every message now lands in a fragmented, low-trust room.
Edelman Trust Barometer, 2026
Twenty years of doing this when it counted
Sizing the exposure
Turning the top-ten risk register into scenarios, positions and pre-cleared language before anyone needs them.
The first six hours
A single accountable voice, so the response is coordinated rather than assembled live from four departments.
Employees first
Internal audiences are stakeholders and witnesses. They hear it before the market does, or they hear it from the market.
Executive readiness
Spokespeople who have practiced under pressure, not just been briefed under calm.
Standing narrative
The credibility you draw down in a crisis is the credibility you deposited in the quiet quarters.
Board-level translation
Reputation reported in the same units as everything else on the agenda: value, exposure, time to recover.
Every organization pays for crisis communications. The only decision is whether it pays in advance, or at 35% off the share price.
Fractional and on-call crisis counsel for PE-backed and high-growth companies.
- — UK Reputation Valuation Report, 2025
- — Burson, Reputation Economy research, 2025
- — Weber Shandwick, executive reputation & readiness studies
- — Aon, Global Risk Management Survey, 2025
- — Aon, Cyber Risk Report, 2025
- — FleishmanHillard, CEO risk-preparedness analysis
- — PwC, Global Crisis and Resilience Survey
- — SenateSHJ, reputational crisis share-price research
- — Ipsos Reputation Council, 2025
- — Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2026
- — Edelman Trust Barometer, 2026
- — Several figures compiled in Rod Cartwright’s Reputation, Risk and Resilience, 2026