Why reputation can't be built in six months
The reputational value curve isn't linear. Knowing where your company sits on it prevents you from stopping exactly when the work starts paying.
The most dangerous moment in a reputation programme is month seven. Not because something bad happens, but because almost nothing visible happens — and at that point the question "are we getting anything out of this?" becomes legitimate.
Three phases, three kinds of result
Year one: building the raw material. Positioning, messages, founder narrative, first editorial angles, publishing discipline, a measured baseline. This is foundation work: it produces internal clarity and first placements, not yet recognition. Anyone expecting commercial results at this stage is measuring the wrong thing.
Year two: building memory. This is where controlled repetition starts producing non-linear effects. The same message, encountered for the fifth time by different people, stops being a message and becomes a belief. The signals that matter appear: journalists coming to you rather than being chased, unsolicited invitations, competitors starting to use your vocabulary.
Year three: building advantage. Reputation enters the commercial process. It shortens sales cycles, reduces price sensitivity, opens doors that were closed and — an underrated point — softens the blow when something goes wrong.
The cost of interruption
Reputational value doesn't decay symmetrically to how it accumulates. Six months of silence don't set you back six months: they set you back further, because in the meantime the conversational space has been occupied by someone else. This is the technical — not commercial — reason why this work only makes sense over multi-year horizons.
What to measure in the meantime
Number of placements is the worst possible metric: easy to inflate and silent on effect. More honest indicators:
- share of voice on the themes you chose to own, against a fixed competitor set;
- share of coverage carrying at least one of your messages, not just your name;
- ratio between engagements you asked for and engagements you received;
- presence and accuracy of your company in AI-generated answers to a fixed set of category questions.
Set them at the start and don't touch them again. Changing metrics mid-course is the most common way to make any result look positive.
Reputation is the only corporate asset that takes years to build and an afternoon to destroy.
