Our Managing Director, Jordan Greenaway, sat down with us to discuss the topic of our latest video – credibility. Having a strong strategy in place and keeping up with changing tides are just some of the ways to become a credible business. 

What is the importance of credibility within one’s business?

Jordan: We strongly believe that credible leadership has important implications for the success of the company – the more credible and respected a leader is, the more likely the business is to be successful.

Now, of course the success of the business hinges on many things, including the strength of their brand and the quality of their products, but often, all of that is driven by the leader. The leader is only able to command the respect and credibility of their employees to drive those type of changes that the business needs to be successful if they’re considered to be credible and respected themselves.

And, outside of one’s business?

J: The same is true of suppliers, partners and investors. If you have a credible leader and they have a really ambitious plan to reinvent a business, the key linchpin here is how trusted and respected that leader is. If everyone has lost faith in the leader, they will not be able to carry out these important changes that will enable the business to become more successful.

And remember this is taking place against the background of a world that is moving faster, where businesses who used to have to reinvent themselves every 10 years in the past, are now having to reinvent themselves pretty much every year. There’s new challenges being thrown at businesses all the time. And in choppy water, the person who can pull the crew together is the captain of the ship – and if they’re not respected and trusted, it will be very difficult to get that ship through choppy water and back into the port.

Does credibility equal visibility and being known?

J: No, I don’t think it does. I think visibility and awareness are components of being credible. But often, too many people jump to the conclusion that credibility equals awareness, and the way to build credibility is to do lots of PR.

But actually, it’s being seen by the right people, saying the right things.

Number one: if you’re the CEO of a listed company that’s operating in the healthcare market, the public by and large don’t need to know about you.

Number two: if you are visible but are saying the wrong things to your target audience, that’s equally going to hurt you. So, it is awareness, but it’s awareness amongst the right type of people, and it’s the right type of awareness.

What might a credibility strategy include?

J: I think there are a number of different stages to a credibility strategy.

Number one is taking the time to step back and recognise which audiences matter. We’ve already said that awareness for awareness sake is useless and can in fact be detrimental. So the first thing you have to do is sit around a table and say: which audiences matter to our business, and which audiences may define our success? And often, when I’m sitting around the table with clients discussing this, they can forget about their most important audience. They think about everyone outside the four walls of their business: their investors, their customers, and so on. You also need to think about the stakeholders inside the four walls of your business – for example, the employees.

So, number one: define those key audiences who are going to determine your success.

Number two: don’t jump straight away to doing PR visibility.

Next is, what should you be saying to those people. And usually, there is some unifying message that you want to say to all of those audiences, maybe, for example, “it’s going to be difficult, but we are going to be reinventing the business.” But actually, there may be sub-messages that you need to target at very specific audiences, for example, in the case of employees, “we’re reinventing ourselves but the work at the end of this process is going to be more meaningful and we’re going to grab a bigger bite of the market.”

Now, number three: convert those messages into various forms of content. There are so many types of content – people often immediately think words on a page, words on a website, they think coverage. Look, written content is an important component, whether it is short form, long form, whether it’s in the context of a research report, an annual report, or a blog post. All these different types of written content.

Why is credibility now more important than ever?

J: We’re seeing a tremendous move in the industry towards rich content because it is more consumable on mobile devices. This is the way the world is going. And if you’re still stuck only doing written content, you’re missing not half of the market, you’re missing nearly 90 percent of the market.

I think within the next 12 months we’re going to see an even bigger shift towards those rich forms of content. So, you’ll need a written strategy, a visual content strategy, an audio strategy, and maybe other types of left field content – maybe it’s animations, maybe it’s graphics. It’s about how you convert those messages into content in a way that will have the most impact.

It’s thinking about the best form of content for that message.

Finally, it’s how do you distribute that content. There’s lots of different vehicles here, the traditional one has always been the newspapers. The newspapers had a stranglehold on the ability to get content into the hands of stakeholders – be it the mainstream press if you wanted to get a message to the mainstream public, be it the financial media if you wanted to get a message to investors, the trade media if you wanted to get your message to suppliers.

But over the last ten years the playing field has started to be leveled. People are just as likely to go onto your website as they are to go to the media. So, you have PR, you have your own website, you have physical mail-outs, you have advertising and paid media, you have events – you have various forms of communication channels.

How does credibility differ from reputation?

J: I don’t like the word reputation. Look, let's unpick credibility and reputation. I think it's difficult because the word ‘reputation’ is quite ill-defined – a reputation can be good, or a reputation can be bad. Generally, you don’t have a bad credibility – you’re either credible or you’re not.

So, my problem with the word reputation is that it has too many fuzzy edges. It isn’t clear what you’re trying to achieve. If you’re saying to a business owner, “I’m going to improve your reputation”, I think an instinctual reply is to say, “I don’t have a bad reputation to begin with.” I think that starts that discussion – which is meant to be very positive and energising – off on a bad footing.

Additionally, the term ‘reputation’ is so woolly that it lets too many PR and reputation agencies off the hook in terms of measuring whether their work has been successful or not. Whereas credibility is a lot simpler. If you just polled two hundred people who mattered asking ‘is this person credible or not?’ you can see the shift between ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.

So, when I talk about reputation, I’m really talking about credibility. It’s a little broader than credibility – it’s whether that person is credible, whether that person is respected, whether that person is trusted. Those are the three axes that I am using to assess and evaluate our work, so we use the word reputation to capture all of those things in a single pot. But I think it’s led to too many bad habits in the industry and that’s why I want us as an agency to get away from that.

How can being a credible business help you stand out from the rest?

J: The world is moving faster. If you want to stay up-to-date with the world, if you want to expand or transform your business, if you want to hire in new types of people, younger people with new skills – one of the things that is going to be a key driver in attracting those people is going to be whether the leader of the business if respected, trusted and considered credible. 

If you don’t have that, then it’s going to be a much more difficult battle to get the right skills, the right products, and to get the right investors. It’s not that credibility enables you to stand out from the rest of the crowd, it’s that credibility gives you the tool to get the other things that enable you to stand out and perform.

If you would like to discuss any of the topics in this article, please do not hesitate to contact us on +44 (0) 208 0641 829 or email enquiry@transmission-private.com.