Communication and the Economic Value of Reputation

Originally published in Valor Setorial Comunicação Corporativa

A quiet transformation is underway in how individuals and organizations are evaluated. Reputation—once more closely associated with spontaneous recognition and the virtues of social life, something that took shape naturally over time through daily interactions and habit—has increasingly become a form of accounting, measured through rankings, scores, frameworks, trust indicators, and indexes of engagement and popularity. This shift from esteem to metrics speaks less to vanity than to a broader reconfiguration: the growing and decisive intertwining of morality and economics, in which the tension between “being” and “appearing” is even more complex than it has ever been.

Historically, reputation was understood as a moral sentiment: the desire to be well regarded by those whose opinions matter. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, for instance, viewed it as a social passion indispensable to justice and cooperation. For him, in seeking a good name, we are driven to behave virtuously. In the contemporary world, however, reputation is increasingly expressed in terms of performance and balance sheets. We speak of reputational capital, reputational risk, reputational return, reputational dividends. This accounting language, while making the concept more operational, can also impoverish its emotional texture: judgment becomes a score, trust becomes an index.

This impoverishment highlights the risk of forgetting that reputation is, ultimately, a feeling—and as such, it does not truly operate in the realm of true or false, much less right or wrong. Metrics, rankings, and indicators may quantify and qualify a perception, but they rarely have the power to alter its nature. Other people’s opinions—that is, what they feel and say about us and about our organizations—do indeed form a kind of balance. Yet it is worth remembering that any balance can be either positive or negative.

Within this new form of accounting, communication functions as a kind of moral infrastructure. It is through communication that values are made legible, that conduct acquires public meaning, and that expectations become stabilized. Reputation, beyond expressing collective judgment, also serves an economic function: it reduces information asymmetries and transaction costs, enabling trust to operate even between parties who do not fully know one another. This ability to simplify uncertainty is what makes reputation an asset—and communication the means through which that asset is produced and sustained.

Corporate communication itself, however, faces a dilemma. Pressure for measurable outcomes and the scarcity of resources push teams toward a logic of immediate visibility. The time required for listening and thoughtful development gives way to the need to remain present, respond quickly, and generate engagement. The risk is that reputation becomes performative: the result of strategies of appearance rather than coherence and consistency—the two key elements in creating what is often called a reputational cushion, a surplus of credibility that helps organizations and individuals navigate moral and image crises with greater resilience.

Recent research clearly shows that corporate communication has never been more strategic to governance and corporate reputation. At the same time, the very companies that recognize strong reputation as a guarantee of business success increasingly operate with leaner teams and shrinking budgets. This paradox may be circumstantial, reflecting financial adjustments and the persistent instability of the economy; but it may also signal something deeper: the shortening of the time and resources necessary to build trust in its fullest sense. Reputation, in this context, tends to cease being a consequence of coherence and instead becomes a calculated anticipation of judgment.

Amid this corporate communication dilemma, one can also observe the emergence of a reputational marketplace. Consultancies, certification bodies, digital platforms, and specialized algorithms produce and distribute signals of credibility. The promise is clear: to reduce uncertainty, standardize criteria, and transform subjective judgments into comparable information. Yet this process also shifts the center of judgment. What was once an interpretive experience becomes mediated by indicators that claim objectivity. Reputation, in this sense, becomes increasingly dependent on the credibility of the instruments that measure it and on the values embedded in their criteria. The promise of technical neutrality masks the fact that all reputation is, to some degree, a moral dispute over what should be recognized as valuable.

At the same time, reputation can be understood as a mode of governance. It guides behavior not through the imposition of rules, but through the expectation of public judgment. Companies and leaders who grasp this dimension treat communication for reputation not as a tool of self-promotion, but as part of a broader legitimacy strategy. In such cases, governing through reputation is not about seeking approval, but about sustaining coherence between discourse and practice. Trust, after all, arises less from the absence of error than from the capacity to learn and respond with transparency.

The economic value of reputation stems precisely from this dual role: it organizes trust and defines what a society considers legitimate. Yet by converting judgments into metrics, the field of reputation now oscillates between the subjectivity of emotions and the objectivity of indicators. Within this tension, communication has become both an instrument of governance and a site of permanent strain. Sustaining coherence, translating values, and managing expectations are tasks that expand even as the available means continue to shrink.

Paulo Nassar

Hamilton dos Santos