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Reputational Risk Management

Protect your business’ reputation with intelligence on emerging threats, expert crisis consulting and efficient risk transfer.

News travels fast, so planning for business reputation risks is critical.

We help you anticipate and prevent reputational threats, respond and recover quickly from crises, and reduce the financial impact of reputational damage.

How WTW can address reputational risk

Reputational risk is the damage that could occur when customers and stakeholders believe you’ve failed to meet their expectations.

Negative perceptions can erode trust and harm your brand, market value and revenue. It can affect:

  • Who buys from you
  • Who wants to work for you
  • How other businesses engage with you

Reputational damage can lower environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings and influence stakeholder and investor decisions.

The Insurer TV Risk Spotlight on Reputational Risk

What are the causes of reputational risk?

Businesses face heightened scrutiny from the public, media, regulators and activists. Social media is a major driver, especially among younger audiences, who rely on it for news and opinions. It can rapidly amplify negative events.

For example, a product failure or a damaging post can travel around the world in minutes. Crises can emerge suddenly, spread rapidly and be hard to control.

In this fast-moving landscape, reputation crisis management can be challenging. Many organizations lack a clear view of reputational risks and their potential financial impact.

But the risk can be managed through insurance and risk mitigation strategies.

Can reputation be insured?

Reputational risks have traditionally been hard to insure as their unpredictability makes them hard to assess and quantify.

Our insurance solution targets reputational risks for businesses exposed to public opinion, especially those in:

  • Leisure and hospitality
  • Retail
  • Transportation
  • Charities
  • Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
  • Manufacturing

The reputational risk triggers include:

Abuse and discrimination

Videos or reports of discrimination or abuse of customers or employees or cruelty to animals can spread quickly online, hurting reputations.

Actual or threatened injury or harm

Physical injury, disease outbreaks, abductions, active assailant attacks and harmful products can quickly undermine confidence and reputation.

Damage by association

Affiliates or partners, such as  celebrities who act unethically can also damage your reputation.

We can also discuss customized coverage for other perils.

How WTW can address reputational risk

Our Reputational Crisis Insurance helps you understand, prevent, manage and recover from reputational damage.

  1. 01

    Artificial intelligence-powered data analysis

    We use AI-powered data analysis from our partner Polecat to monitor public data, such as social media, to identify emerging reputational threats.

    Polecat monitors 8 million online sources, including all tier-one media globally and more than 30 million social media posts.

    And WTW’s Reputational and Crisis Dashboard aggregates Polecat’s data for nine triggers and named perils on a single platform in real time.

Artificial-Intelligence powered data analysis

  1. Responsible Business Intelligence (RBI) index

    Polecat’s RBI offers a clear view on reputational trends. It converts online and social media data into a single, trackable score. The score is shown on a three-month graph comparing you to others in your industry. You can analyze the data on individual risk topics and analyze the conversations that lie behind any spike or dip in your RBI score to gain a clear picture of where risks might emerge.

  2. Crisis consultancy

    We help you establish a plan of action, respond and recover quickly and minimize reputational damage.

    Crisis communication: In a fast-moving situation, every minute counts. We’ll arrange and pay for crisis consultancy experts to support your response during an event and your recovery afterwards, including post-event public-relations costs.

    Brand rehabilitation: Because rebuilding trust can take time, our solution includes promotional and advertising costs for brand rehabilitation and revenue recovery.

  3. Risk transfer and mitigation

    We help you manage the financial impact of reputational risks.

    Profit protection: Working with Liberty Specialty Markets, a leading global insurer with a strong financial rating, we can cover you for loss of gross profit from named reputational risks. We can arrange up to $50 million of aggregate cover for critical costs such as losses suffered while your business is interrupted.

    Interim claims payment: The insurer will pay part of the loss immediately, so that you can cover critical expenses right away because in a crisis, you can’t afford to wait for your claim to be processed.

  4. Quantifying your reputational risk

    Our Reputational Risk Quantification model eliminates the guesswork from measuring reputation risk. It enables you to predict the frequency and severity of likely sources of reputational threats and the financial impact of reputational damage, through ground up, granular modeling. This can show you the real cost of reputation risk, giving you an evidence- and data-based value that can enable more informed decisions and proactive risk management.

Example scenarios

Airline attracts public criticism

The situation

A global airline received public criticism after its crew stopped a customer from boarding a flight. Staff mistakenly thought the customer had pushed one of their colleagues. Other passengers filmed the incident. They posted to social media the videos, saying they were shocked by the staff’s behavior.

The videos went viral, leading some people to say they would boycott the airline. Customers began to book with other airlines as the social media backlash grew.

How we could help

Our reputational crisis insurance covers reputational damage caused by the mistreatment or abuse of a customer by an employee. This includes loss of gross profit suffered as a result, as well as the cost of crisis communications and brand rehabilitation.

Safety incident at tourist attraction

The situation

A high-profile tourist attraction hosted a carnival. A ride malfunctioned, resulting in dramatic images and videos on social media. Some people suffered minor injuries, but social posts led to rumors and speculation that people were severely harmed or even killed. The bad publicity resulted in the early closure of the carnival and reduced ticket sales for the tourist attraction. In this scenario, the attraction’s public liability and property policies would cover third-party costs but not the cost of the reputational damage to the business.

How we could help

We could help the attraction recover. Our reputational crisis insurance solution includes a bodily injury trigger, so the business would be covered for loss of gross profit as a result of the reputational damage associated with the accident, as well as the cost of crisis communications and brand rehabilitation.

All names, characters, and incidents portrayed in the case studies are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, companies, entities or products is intended or should be inferred.

Talk to us

For more information about this solution or to request a demo of Polecat's online platform, please contact our specialist listed at the top of this page.

Related capabilities

Luxury brands risk management

With WTW’s understanding of the luxury brand sector, we provide innovative advice and broking to help you manage risk.

Manufacturing

Discover how our manufacturing industry specialists can help you address existing and emerging risks in the volatile business landscape, supporting your resilience and growth.

Reputational Risk Quantification Model

Our pioneering Reputation Risk Quantification Model allows you to predict the financial impact of reputation damage, so you can accurately protect your business.

Transportation and Logistics

WTW is a recognized market leader in the provision of people, risk and capital services to the transportation sector. We develop risk management and human capital programs for organizations that move people or goods and the infrastructure that facilitates the movement of people and goods.

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