How High Is Up?

There were two psychologists who met on the street and passed a few words. 'How's your wife?', asked one. 'Compared to what?' queried the other, illustrating the point that images can't be compared in a vacuum.

I was once reporting the results of a staff attitude study to the board of one company and commented to them how good their canteen must be, as only 25% of the workforce thought it was "bloody awful", whereas in the average company, 45% thought the canteen "bloody awful".

For years, we have built databases of our normative data for employee attitude studies on the one hand, and local authority surveys on the other. Now my colleagues Stewart Lewis and Sara Grant-Vest have done the same with image profile data from a battery of various studies we carry out periodically, including captains of industry, business & financial journalists, City analysts, and many other publics of importance to companies. The graph below uses MPs' attitudes as an example. This type of analysis is being used in a new service called Cobra, recently launched by MORI and Porter Novelli jointly in an effort to help major organisations understand better how they are regarded among publics of important to them, and what they can do to enhance the effectiveness of their communications programmes addressed to these publics.

The metric part of Cobra measures the comparative image attribute scores of individual companies set against the profile of scores of a number of comparable companies from data collected over time among comparable audiences. In the example, we've taken the views of British MPs over several years rating scores of companies as much above average, somewhat above average, about average, somewhat below average and much below average on the attributes of two companies, each well known to MPs, and each trying hard to communicate to identified MPs as important to their future in this country, on the attributes of treatment of staff, environmental responsibility, social responsibility, communications with MPs, management quality, economic contribution and its financial record.

We know from other questions that Labour MPs and Opposition MPs have very different ratings of importance (salience) of each of these seven attribute groupings, and we know that many descriptives can be included among the metrics of each of the seven attribute groups. By using multivariate analysis, we can determine which factors contribute most significantly to each factor grouping, but as a 'simple' (sorry) summary measure, it doesn't get much more useful (in general) than in the graph here.

We've taken two companies, Company A and company B to illustrate the point. One is an oil company, the other a formerly nationalised industry. Each is large, well known, and each has identified MPs as a public of importance to its future success and therefore a public worth communicating with.

For some companies a score that puts them among the top ten companies we've ever measured (Category I) is an achievable goal. In fact, Company B reaches the top ten Category I measurement in four of the seven attribute groupings. Well done Company B, even though on one of the measures (environmental record) only 48% of MPs rated it above average, while on two other measurements, economic contribution and financial record 86% rated it above average. Yet on other categories, falling between 38% rating Company B as above average in its staff treatment put it well into Category II, and only a point or two below top ten, while 36% in its social record put it in the middle of Category III, around the median for all companies measured.

So, how high is up? For company B, which might aspire for a top ten rating across the board, they have achieved top marks already in five of the seven attribute categories, but have work to do to climb into the top ten in terms of their rating on communicating with MPs and in achieving 'agathos', the Greek word that roughly translates into not just being good, but being seen to be good.

Company A is in a different league. Very nearly a top ten player in being perceived as meeting its social responsibilities, and is the Category II in communicating with MPs, it barely makes Category III in its economic contribution, and Category IV in its environmental performance. With under one in five MPs rating it above average on staff treatment, management and financial performance.

I've preached for years that to make it to the top, and stay there, a company, or any organisation for that matter, has to not only be good, but be seen to be good, 'agathos'. This new way of looking at your image is the best measure I've seen for scoring how you are doing at getting there... if there is where you aspire to be.

Sir Robert Worcester is the Chairman of MORI