A strong corporate reputation is built from within

Who are the people in your life that you really trust?

For most people, the circle of trust does not extend very far. You have your immediate family and maybe a handful of friends, some coworkers. It is usually people you have a long and close relationship to. The trust is in large part based on personal experience.

Sometimes, however, you trust complete strangers or people you have no direct personal experience with. It might be the random customer service representative you meet in the store. It might be the CEO of the company you work for but have never actually met. It might be a journalist, a commentator, or a news anchor. It might be an actor and artist or an athlete. It might even be a politician.

Maybe the trust isn’t as deep as the trust you reserve for your closest family and friends. Still, it impacts the way you interact with these people. It increases the likelihood that you buy from them, vote for them, consume content from them, propagate their views, cheer for them.

Sometimes trust can even extend to corporations.

We see this in Ipsos Norway’s annual Corporate Reputation Study where we measure the public’s trust towards Norwegian public and private corporations, and NGOs. Each year we give an award to a corporation that has impressed us.

This year the award went to the chemicals company Jotun.

Jotun is an example of a company that is quite peripheral to most Norwegians. They may have used one of their brands within decorative paints but might not even be aware that Jotun is the producer. Jotun employs 10 000 people around the world, but only about 600 at their headquarters in the small coastal city of Sandefjord. 

Truth be told, most Norwegians have very limited direct experience with Jotun.

Still, we measure a very high level of trust towards the company. And have consistently done so since we started measuring the reputation of Jotun in 2011. Why do people trust a company they know very little about?

Åsne Vittersø Kvamme, Jotun’s Group Communications Director, asked me if staying out of the headlines can explain the high level of public trust in the company. To some extent it can. You obviously earn some reputation points by avoiding scandals. 

But it must be more to it than that. On a personal level it takes more to really trust someone than the lack of past wrongdoing on their part.

To me, Jotun falls in the category of strangers you instinctively trust, even if you cannot really articulate why. It’s kind of the x-factor of corporate reputation.

Jotun’s President and CEO, Morten Fon, is adamant that he knows what the x-factor is. That a strong corporate reputation is built from the inside out. It all starts with company culture, which in Jotun’s case, is summed up in what is called the Penguin Spirit and its corporate values of loyalty, care, respect, and boldness. 

It is debatable if this is the way of the penguins, but it is the way of Jotun (which has a penguin in the logo). And as Morten jokingly says, “nobody dislikes penguins.”

Jokes aside, Morten might be on to something. Corporate values can be fluffy and pretentious, to say the least, but in Jotun’s case I believe in them. As Morten points out, the values were articulated in 2005, but have been with them as silent guardrails since the company was founded by Odd Gleditsch in the 1920s. It was less a case of finding suitable values, and more a case of stating explicitly what was already there, as Morten explains. 

The simple fact that the values are carved into the wood panelling in the reception area hints at the long-term commitment to them. You can’t simply add new ones with a fresh coat of (Jotun) paint after the next strategy session of the management. They are there to stay, and to be seen by everyone – employees, and visitors alike.

So, yes, I believe that the corporate values of Jotun helps them operate in a way that builds trust – treating employees, clients and the local population with respect. And that that trust inevitably seeps into the broader population, who do not have a direct relationship with the company.

The greater learning here, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, is that business ethics matter. A good corporate reputation doesn’t come through boasting in glossy ad campaigns about your purpose, sustainability, or diversity credentials. It’s more important that the company treats its workforce, it’s customers, the greater community, and the environment with respect, over time and all the time. 

That show of respect translates into trust and a strong corporate reputation. That, at least, seems to be the case for Jotun. We congratulate Jotun on winning Ipsos’ Corporate Reputation Price 2023!

Photo by Ian Parker on Unsplash.com