The Bayer-Monsanto fusion: countering brand tarnishing and rebuilding reputation

摘要

This article suggests several actionable insights for managers that are summarized visually in the form of a "reputational perception-molding heptagon" in Figure 1 as an intuitive managerial aid to anticipate and address reputational challenges. It is ideal for a firm to demonstrate the highest possible levels of ethics while fulfilling its social contract and fiduciary responsibilities to diverse stakeholders. Our study design and results are intended to offer guidance to firms operating in high-risk, high-reward sectors pursuing solutions to pressing problems facing humanity through innovative, relatively less-tested technologies that may face "reputational transfer" effects and need to repeatedly manage reputational hurdles. Such effects could arise from the intrinsic nature of their sector's need to explore and develop hitherto unknown technologies with the associated risks that may evoke public fears and historical socio-political factors not entirely within their locus of control. An increasingly important factor for such firms to manage is ideological opposition from certain subsets of the wide spectrum of bounded-rational-emotional, better-informed stakeholders. An increasingly complex world demands more sophisticated, multi-dimensional optimization of all aspects of enterprise activities to ensure globally sustainable development while maximizing individual, firm-level and community benefits.