Research

StakeholderWatch's research programme, run with researchers at VU Amsterdam, asks one question in several forms. When something happens to a firm, an internal or external crisis, which stakeholder judgments move, by how much, and how soon will those judgments turn into decisions that result in stakeholders change their buying, working, investing or recommending intentions related to the firm?

The programme

The programme treats reputation as several evaluations rather than one score. Stakeholders not only judge a firm's character and its capability but also the specific proximate issue that lies in front of them. One study follows a product crisis at a global aircraft manufacturer and shows that costly acts of accountability, verified fixes and negative disclosures each move different evaluations, at different speeds, with different consequences for the decision to fly. A second study follows a brewer's exit from a sanctioned market and models how a reputational scar forms, goes dormant and can be reopened by information that has nothing to do with the firm. A third compares two car makers and shows that the context a firm has taught its public to see it through actually changes how every later signal is read by those stakeholders.

Method and feedback into the product

All studies use daily, single-firm survey data with structural equation and break-point methods, the same methods that run in Causal Intelligence. The findings feed back into the model: the distinction between evaluative domains, the routing of signals, and the lag between judgment and decision are all built into how the dashboard reads a day's data.