Reputation Is a Currency: Are You Spending or Earning?

A lot of brand managers are obsessed with growth.

“Let’s double our followers. Let’s make noise. Let’s go viral.”

You know what you rarely hear?

“Let’s make sure people still trust us six months from now.”

Because trust, real, lasting trust, doesn’t show up on a campaign dashboard.

It doesn’t spike in your engagement chart but it’s what determines whether someone sticks with you when things go quiet, or when things go wrong.

Reputation is invisible until it isn’t. It’s not sexy. It’s not immediate. But it’s absolutely everything.

I’ve seen brands pour millions into advertising and not move the needle, simply because people don’t believe them anymore.

I’ve also seen underfunded, unpolished businesses thrive purely because they consistently delivered what they promised and built trust, one human interaction at a time.

Your brand’s reputation is your most powerful currency.

The question is: are you earning it, or spending it?

Let’s break that down. Every business has two bank accounts.

The first is the one your accountant sees, cash flow, profit margin, operating costs.

The second is your reputational account.

The one the public manages, but no one in your boardroom wants to talk about.

You either build up goodwill through consistency, integrity, and results or you quietly drain it with every missed call, overpromise, delayed refund, passive-aggressive email, and half-hearted apology.

The thing is, most withdrawals don’t feel like much at the time.

You deliver something late, client doesn’t complain. You cut corners, no one notices. Your customer service team sends a cold, dismissive reply, problem solved.

Except it’s not.

Because your reputation doesn’t collapse all at once. It erodes quietly, in whispers.

One person says, “I wouldn’t use them again.”

Another says, “They’re okay, but a bit arrogant.”

Eventually, someone important, an investor, a journalist, a corporate client hears, “They used to be great, but something’s off lately.”

By the time your marketing team realises no one’s clicking your campaigns, it’s not a budget issue.

It’s a trust issue.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: PR doesn’t fix a bad reputation. It just reveals one.

When the foundation is solid, PR can amplify credibility.

But when the foundation is shaky, PR is just a glossy brochure masking a leaky roof.

If your systems are broken, your team is burnt out, or your customer experience is trash, then all PR can do is delay the inevitable, not prevent it.

You don’t manage reputation with spin. You manage it with behaviour. Consistent, boring, honest, adult behaviour.

That means replying when you say you will. Fixing things when you break them.

Saying “I don’t know” when you actually don’t know and not treating your audience like fools when they catch you bluffing.

If you need a real-world example, look no further than AirAsia and the tragic crash of QZ8501 in 2014.

It was a horrific incident. But what happened next was a case study in leadership under pressure.

Tony Fernandes didn’t go into hiding. He didn’t post a templated condolence tweet and disappear into a media vacuum.

He flew straight to Surabaya. He faced the families. He stood in front of journalists. He acted like a human first, CEO second.

That didn’t make the tragedy any less painful, but it reminded the public that there was someone at the helm, someone who took responsibility when it mattered most.

It’s easy to behave like a brand when everything’s going well but when everything falls apart, people want to know if there’s still a person behind the logo.

That’s where reputation is made or lost.

The hardest part about reputation? You don’t get to measure it on a weekly report.

There’s no “trust score” in your CRM dashboard.

No Excel sheet showing how many people still believe in you after the hype fades.

But you’ll feel it in the tone of the emails you receive. In the warmth (or lack thereof) in client check-ins.

In how your staff speak about you when you’re not in the room. In whether people give you the benefit of the doubt or twist the knife when you slip up.

And when your competitors make a mistake and bounce back but you make a similar one and get torn to shreds?

That’s not unfair. That’s your reputational balance catching up with you.

So here’s the uncomfortable but necessary question:

If your brand stopped posting tomorrow, if your office vanished for a week, if something blew up and you had to go silent while sorting it out...

Would people defend you? Recommend you? Miss you? Trust you to make it right?

If the answer’s no, then you’ve been spending more than you’ve been earning and it’s time to rebuild before the account runs dry.

Reputation is not built by being popular. It’s built by being reliable, even when no one’s watching.

And when the market gets loud, messy, unpredictable, it’s the brands with reputational wealth that survive the storm.