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The purpose of this paper is to examine the extraordinary reputational challenge for brands in social media in an era of heightened political and cultural polarization. In a time when the tension between liberal and conservative consumers has grown significantly, brands are being threatened with boycotts from both the left and right. In this paper, the authors identify some core approaches for brands facing this dilemma.

The authors’ approach is to review the experience of various brands which have been the victims of consumer boycotts motivated by political considerations. The authors examined these events from the perspective of the severity/duration of their impact on the brand, how the brands chose to respond and how their response was perceived to suggest the approaches that seem to be most effective in mitigating brand damage.

The authors have found that the critical factors in mitigating brand damage are giving clear guidelines to employees about customer relations, understanding the composition of the customer base more deeply through the lens of politics and culture, developing a comprehensive risk management approach and creating a consistent point of view on handling political threats and boycotts to ensure consistency.

The authors’ evaluation is by definition subjective and the insights gained have not been tested empirically.

While the potential political threats to a specific brand are reasonably predictable, consumer perceptions are influenced by many factors only partially within the brand’s control.

Much as companies gained expertise in managing reputation crises throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the authors believe that brands adopting their approach to politically driven boycotts will gradually learn how to manage them and the threats will become a routine part of a brand’s relationship with its stakeholders.

While a great deal has been written about the nature and growth of politically driven brand threats, the authors believe this paper is an original contribution to how to manage them.

This paper aims to address the continuing absence of older individuals portrayed across the advertising spectrum.

A selective citation of research about seniors as a powerful wealth segment and growing demographic contrasted with their almost complete absence from any advertising/marketing other than for products for the “aged.”

The research clearly demonstrates that older people are active buyers of consumer products, especially digital products and that stereotypes about the behaviors and opinions of classic generational cohorts are invalid.

This viewpoint is based on selective citations from the relevant literature and makes no claim to being a comprehensive review.

If the recommendations suggested in the viewpoint are adopted, people should see more older people depicted sensitively in a wider range of product categories from cell phones to detergent.

If the viewpoints expressed in the article being widely known and understood, people should see a reduction in the careless stereotyping of Boomers, Millennials and other cohorts, leading to greater empathy and understanding.

The viewpoint brings together many disparate threads around marketing to seniors and generational cohort stereotyping in a way that has not been done before, to the best of the author’s knowledge.

This study aims to identify the risks to corporate reputation presented by deepfakes and how to manage them.

The approach involves a review of the current literature on deepfakes across different sectors to create a clear picture of the risks that deepfakes entail and how best to deal with them.

While deepfakes are still mostly easily detectable, their sophistication increases daily, and corporations need both technology and culture shifts to deal with this evolving threat.

While deepfakes have been the subject of intense interest, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first attempt to look at the problem from the perspective of corporate enterprise risk.

To assess the ability of generative AI to assist in crisis management planning and response.

The viewpoint is built on a “conversation” with ChatGPT (CGPT) on the subject of crisis management. As such, portions of the text were generated by CGPT, a Large Language Model (LLM) and not by the author.

While CGPT has mastered the language of crisis management, its ability to assist in real-life situations is probably limited. Paradoxically, it believes it can help provide predictive analytics even though it claims not to be able to assess future events.

The author believes that the paradoxes inherent in CGPT’s claims to be able to assist in crisis management have not previously been examined.

The purpose of this study is to examine the unique confluence of forces impacting global corporations in an era of geopolitical turmoil and the resources needed to respond to them.

This viewpoint looks at contemporary accounts of trends in natural resources, renewable energy, US–China conflict and technology innovation to assess the new risks posed to global corporations.

To manage risk in this new era of geopolitical turmoil, global corporations will need to become significantly better resources in expertise relating to technical areas such as mining, AI, trade and renewable energy.

While the forces described have been discussed before, the author believes that, to the best of his knowledge, this is the first attempt to assess their impact from the perspective of corporate reputation risk.

This study aims to discuss the tension between the almost universal existence of ongoing change management initiatives, the speed of C Suite transitions and the shrinking of middle management.

This viewpoint looks at coverage of change management initiatives and the statistics on management transitions across different industries.

The review of the data suggests that the increase in change management initiatives set against senior management instability and the shrinkage in middle management is leading to diminishing returns. The author suggests that increasing stability and consistency in core areas is becoming more important to corporate financial success.

While change management has been extensively studied, little attention has been paid to the juxtaposition of these initiatives with senior management fluidity and shrinking middle management resources.

The purpose of this study is to examine the long struggle to increase diversity and inclusion in the leadership of large corporations. In spite of significant progress, women and minorities are still woefully under-represented. The extraordinary diversity of the Millennial generation (born between 1982 and 2004) should help accelerate change, but it is not believed that demographics on its own will dramatically improve matters. This viewpoint examines some of the underlying tensions around diversity in the workplace and suggests some approaches that could have a positive impact.

The paper cites a number of statistics from the secondary literature that demonstrate how, unfortunately, diversity still suffers periodic setbacks as well as improvements. It then examines the actual world of work to propose ways in which “inclusion” in the workplace and not just diversity in recruitment has a role to play.

In addition to the importance of a strong minority recruitment pipeline, the establishment of affinity networks and minority mentoring, the author also found that some routine business practices need to be carefully examined to see how they promote or defeat inclusion. These include the trend toward less formal meeting structures that can militate against diverse voices being heard; the need to create greater awareness around the tendency of men to interrupt women disproportionality; and the tyranny of teams in which individual credit is often obscured. By being conscious of these practices, their negative impact on diversity and inclusion can be mitigated.

The findings are the author’s own viewpoint and would need to be validated in controlled studies.

The best practices proposed would need to be adapted to fit well in different corporate cultures both geographically and by industry type.

If corporate leaders devoted sufficient attention to these day-to-day business practices, the author believes that they would see a noticeable increase in diversity and inclusion, leading to better productivity and more rewarding roles for women and minorities in the workplace.

While diversity and inclusion have been written about extensively, the author is not aware of any comparable reflections on best practices in the workplace of this kind.

This paper aims to focus attention on the increasing interest of regulators in ensuring ethical behavior in public companies. It suggests a variety of ways in which corporations can monitor and assess their own compliance with ethical standards.

This viewpoint assesses past efforts to create measurement frameworks for ethical standards for corporate integrity and reviews recent business literature on this topic to suggest ways that companies can improve their monitoring and reporting on corporate integrity.

The study suggests that standards for monitoring corporate culture for ethical compliance are still relatively under-developed. It proposes that, while the exploration of better models continues, it is still critical for companies to “use old-fashioned tools” to monitor for danger signals.

The paper is not a comprehensive review of all the available literature on the topic of corporate culture and ethical compliance, so there may be critical contributions that have been overlooked.

The paper provides pragmatic insights to help companies assess how their culture is or is not contributing to high levels of corporate integrity and tools to continuously asses this aspect of corporate governance.

To the extent that companies more fully understand how their culture influences corporate integrity, they will be better able to prevent scandals that impact their reputation and erode stakeholder trust.

The literature on how to monitor and measure the impact of culture on corporate integrity is still relatively sparse. The paper focuses new attention on the emerging regulatory standards that will influence this space.

The purpose of this paper is to point to some emerging workplace issues relating to the increasing collaboration between human and robot workers. As the number of human workers shrinks and that of robots increases, how will this change the dynamics of the workplace and human worker motivation?

The approach of this paper is to examine recent academic, business and media writings on the subject of artificial intelligence and robotics in the workplace to identify gaps in our understanding of the new hybrid work environment.

What the author has found is that although there are numerous voices expressing concerns about the replacement of human workers by robots, there has not as yet been a substantive study of the impact on human workers of sharing their work life with robots in this environment.

The findings in this paper are limited by the fact that they are drawn from a review of the secondary literature rather than from primary research and are therefore speculative and anecdotal.

The practical implications of the findings are to suggest that it is time to establish a systematic and standardized method for analyzing and measuring the impact on human workers of operating in an environment increasingly populated by automated co-workers.

The author suspects that the social implications will be to suggest that as a human society we will need to establish psychologically and culturally valid means for coping with this new work environment, and the author believes some of the findings may well prove counter intuitive within the social context of work.

The author does not believe there is any substantial work addressing the social, psychological or cultural implications of humans working besides robots on a daily basis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins of and current practices in corporations seeking to define themselves as “purpose-driven”. The literature suggests that consumers, in particular Millennials, are attracted to companies that define themselves in this way both in terms of their buying behaviors and as places they would wish to work. The author also wanted to examine whether this trend represented a significant departure from previous activities in corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility, sustainability or the triple bottom line.

This viewpoint reviewed the history of corporate philanthropy and social commitments from the 1880s to today to identify trend waves in this category. The author then examined some current examples of “purpose-driven” behavior to identify best practices.

The author found that there is considerable confusion in the marketplace about what constitutes best practices in corporate citizenship. The author also found that the outputs from preceding waves of corporate citizenship have created atomized pockets of similar activities in individual companies that either overlapped or were at odds with each other. This analysis suggested that there were four key requirements for companies trying to maintain a purpose-driven corporate brand: long-term commitment, authenticity, that they be employee-driven and be based on collaboration.

The viewpoint was based on secondary source material and did not involve any primary research.

By identifying some core principles for purpose-driven activity, the viewpoint will help companies create and effectively maintain a master narrative.

This review of corporate social responsibility will also create framework for thinking about the appropriate balance between the social and profit-driven motives of today’s corporations.

The author believes that this viewpoint is the first to examine the entire spectrum of corporate social commitment from both a historical and contemporary perspective.