How behavioural science is helping us improve our understanding of corporate reputations

Reputation research has always been a matter of applied psychology. We want to understand how people think, feel, and behave – we want a glimpse of what is going on inside their heads.

We increasingly understand that this is more complicated than we once thought. People are not always the best judges of their own motivations or feelings. The relationships between self-reported perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours and the actual observed behaviours of people are strongly positive, but they are not perfect.

The insights industry has begun to adopt a range of new approaches designed to supplement self-reporting. Observational techniques like ethnography – observing, for example, a day in the life of a consumer – are in vogue. This makes sense when you can directly observe your subject of interest, but that is not always possible.

Observation in reputation research is especially difficult. Your reputation is what other people say about you when you are not in the room, and is not something we can observe without unduly influencing the outcome. 

Moreover, observation fails to give us insight into motivations or perceptions. These limitations mean we must go beyond just new methods and adopt new thinking as well. 

Behavioural science sits at the heart of the new thinking we are adopting in the Reputation Centre. For us, the insights of cognitive psychologists like Daniel Kahneman bridge the gap between what people say and the hidden processes that play such a big role in determining what they really think and feel.

Our view is that traditional survey research accesses the conscious mind, the part which is aware of experience and makes decisions. Lift the hood, however, and there are a range of nonconscious cognitive processes called heuristics that help us process information and make decisions quickly, like whether to jump out of the way of a car or not.

Heuristics help us to process information, influencing the perceptions, attitudes, and decision-making rationales the conscious mind becomes aware of. The key to completing our picture of how people think, feel, and behave is a matter of accessing this nonconscious aspect of their lives.
Understanding the nonconscious processes through which stakeholders and the public think about brands immeasurably improves insights-driven communications strategies and reputation management. A more complete picture of what’s going on in our audiences’ heads can give a significant edge over competitors trying to influence the same people. 

In the Reputation Centre, we are now starting to apply a range of behavioural science-based solutions in consultation with our clients, such cognitive schema mapping and manual implicit association testing.

We are establishing best practice principles by which to assess and improve corporate communications, and using implicit research techniques to provide a much more complete picture of what the people who matter to you think and feel, and why they say what they do about you.