In communications, reputation isn't what the organization would like to be remembered for. It's what the market doesn't forget.
Organizations pretend they don’t remember. They rebrand without acknowledging what happened, change leadership to erase collective decisions, or publish reports that omit the most serious incidents. The market, however, does not have that luxury.
The court sentenced Ricardo Salgado to thirteen years in prison and suspended the sentence at the same time, because a neurodegenerative disease prevents him from understanding what it means to be convicted—and here, above all else, is a legitimate decision regarding a sick man, which is not for me to question. What interests me is what lingers after the case is closed, almost like an unintended side effect: the idea that those who are unaware of what they have done cannot be held accountable. Because organizations, unlike Salgado, are fully aware—and yet they often behave as if they don’t remember.
“Turning the page” is an expression we all use but no one really thinks about. It always comes after something goes wrong—a crisis, a failed product, the mass layoffs, the partnership that ended up in court—and it almost always plays out in the same way: the brand is rebranded without explaining why, leadership is shuffled out as if swapping out a character witness, and a report is presented in which the difficult year simply never happened. It’s a plea for acquittal addressed to a court that doesn’t exist. And silence, which seems to be the safest option, is almost always the most costly. Because when an organization decides not to talk about something, it doesn’t mean the market will conclude that it didn’t happen.
Reputation lives in the minds of those who have bought, hired, invested, or refused to do any of these things. And that memory isn’t generated from within, much less in B2B business. Because on the other side of the table, there’s rarely just one person—rather, there are many “Decision-Making Units”—and none of them will change their minds just because the company launched a new brand to erase the damage caused by the old one.
There is a distinction that the literature in my field established long ago, but which practice seems to continue to confuse every day, with real costs: identity is what the organization is and controls; image is the snapshot that each person takes at a given moment. Reputation, on the other hand, is something else entirely: it is what remains when years of these snapshots are layered on top of one another. Identity can be changed in a single board meeting. Image is shaped through a campaign. Reputation is the only one of the three that does not obey those who want to change it. It does not belong to the organization; it forms slowly, through accumulation, and is always shaped by third parties who are attentive to the context.
Consistency and trust are, quite simply, the way to avoid making a mistake in a decision to which your name will be tied for years. An investor who has witnessed a collapse firsthand does not change his mind just because a new manager has since taken over. His memory is selective, and he naturally focuses on exactly what the company would have preferred to leave behind.
And then there’s the timing, which the Salgado case makes clear: the conviction comes long after the damage has already been done. BES collapsed in 2014, and that’s when confidence was shattered—not this week. For those who have already formed an opinion, this latest punishment is, above all, a belated stamp of approval. In the corporate world, the process is similar. When the “verdict” finally comes out—whether through a media investigation, an audit, regulatory intervention, or a key client walking away (and explaining why)— the market has long since passed judgment, based on everything it has seen—how the company behaved during the crisis, what it admitted, and what it swept under the rug. That’s why the question is never what to say after the crisis. It’s how to act beforehand, knowing that the verdict on one’s reputation is immediate.
Companies that manage to build a resilient or solid reputation essentially do one thing that seems obvious but that almost no one does: they explain what happened, rather than hiding it, and show what has changed as a result of that incident—which is the only way to rebuild trust. It is not a communication problem—or at least not solely one. The organization must first have understood the consequences of its actions—and that understanding, contrary to what the court ruled in the Salgado case, cannot be suspended for health reasons.
In the end, one question remains that goes beyond this specific case and the legal debate surrounding it. In a country debating whether a man still understands the sentence he was given, perhaps it’s worth turning the question around and applying it to those who are fully capable of understanding: do organizations truly grasp the consequences of their actions? Building a reputation by counting on the forgetfulness of others is betting against time and against the memory of stakeholders, who, unlike Ricardo Salgado, do not have a medical condition to excuse them.