Reputational Risk and Crisis Management

A crisis is a defining moment for a company. The way a company manages an adverse event—particularly in the current economic environment—can severely threaten or greatly enhance its operations, investor confidence, customer loyalty, employee morale, and community standing—in short, its reputation.The Reputational Risk & Crisis Management Practice helps clients protect and strengthen their reputations.

From crisis management planning to real-time crisis response and recovery, we provide reputational risk and crisis management services to support our clients before, during, and after an adverse event. We have the experience and resources to allow you to turn adversity into opportunity. Our team will help develop, manage, and maintain a tailored reputational risk and crisis management program specific to your needs and circumstances.

Managing Reputational Risk

Corporate reputation is best defined as the perception of a company in the minds of its stakeholders; those vital to the success of the business—employees, customers, partners, lenders, regulators, communities, and so on. It’s no wonder that reputation is commonly referred to as a company’s most valuable asset. Reputation is not simply about a balance sheet, service offerings, social responsibility, or even corporate communications, marketing, and public relations—reputation is all of these and more.The essential first step to managing reputation strategically is building an accurate picture of your strengths and weaknesses.

Our approach:

• Quantifies the impact on reputation of specifically identified risk.
• Creates a baseline for measurement and improvement.
• Establishes a continuing process for detection and management of issues that can affect reputation.
• Provides the company with the proper guidelines to manage, protect, and improve reputation in a manner that is consistent with its culture and resources.
  
• Coordinates management actions and the escalation of issues with the potential for crisis.
  

Reputation is at the heart of everything your organization does, and especially must be protected when faced with a crisis.

Crisis Management

The best approach to protecting your company’s future is to implement an effective crisis management program before a crisis ever occurs. MRC can help you design a crisis management program that protects your company, its people, and its operations.

A crisis management program helps you prepare for, manage, and recover from issues and incidents that threaten your people, brand, valuation, customers, finances, or operations. It is a systematic approach designed to help you manage crises that arise from more traditional risks like regulatory inquiries, natural disasters, and litigation to other threats to your business such as product recall and NGO activism.

MRC will help you design a multi-year crisis management program that achieves a crisis preparedness capability and culture of prevention, through:

• Assessing crisis preparedness by benchmarking existing plans and procedures against best practices and industry standards.
• Developing a crisis management plan that enables management to respond to any issue or event and manage it effectively to prevent a crisis.
  
• Training and exercising crisis management teams to validate plans and procedures.
  
  We believe that the ability to manage a crisis effectively is the result of in-depth understanding of risks, thorough crisis management planning, regular exercising, and a strategy for maintaining these capabilities over time.

Real-Time Crisis Consulting

At no time is an organization or its reputation more at risk than during a crisis. Our senior consultants with extensive experience in crisis management provide 24/7 counsel and hands-on support to senior leaders and the board to help them manage and mitigate any potential damage, bolster stakeholder confidence, and protect the company’s brand.

During a crisis, we:

• Provide actionable analysis  of the potential threat to all stakeholder groups;
• Develop crisis management  strategy.
• Determine and implement appropriate preventative measures.
• Define the decision-making framework, manage the event, and guide the company’s crisis response.
• Ensure existing incident response plans are properly aligned, including business continuity, emergency response, human impact, communications, etc.
• Identify emerging issues and risks that could escalate the crisis.
• Augment a company’s existing communications team with senior crisis communications professionals working on-site.
• Provide humanitarian assistance.
  
• Transition the company back to normal.

By combining expertise in crisis management, law, media, communications, reputation management, and public policy, we offer clients deep experience in a broad range of issues: from civil litigation to bankruptcy and restructuring, from natural disasters to labor unrest and downsizing. Our team has successfully supported companies during some of the most severe, high-profile events in every region of the world.

In addition, Marsh is approved by most major insurers to provide real-time crisis management services to policyholders, so a portion of our fee is often paid under our client’s insurance coverage.

The MRC Solution

MRC’s Reputational Risk & Crisis Management Practice has comprehensive solutions that reduce the likelihood of risk and diminish its impact if it does materialize; we can even help you leverage the opportunities risk often reveals. We empower our clients with the knowledge and the tools, programs, and practices that will preserve, protect, and defend invaluable business assets—human, financial, physical, and reputational—against any risk, anywhere, anytime.