Corporate reputation research for the conversations that decide yours.

Sometimes, and it’s worth finding out which, because a stable index isn’t the same thing as a stable reputation. An index is an average, and an average is built to absorb disagreement. Two groups moving hard in opposite directions produce exactly the same flat line as a company where nothing at all is happening, and from the chart you can’t tell the two apart. We open the score by group instead of reading the middle of it, and the question we’re answering is who’s moving, in which direction, and what’s driving each of them. That often means finding that one part of your world sits far above the number you report and another sits far below it, with almost nobody actually standing where the average is. The group below it is often the one closest to how the company operates day to day, which is also why it moves first. Getting there takes all three lenses: what people tell a researcher, what they tell each other, and what the sample confirms. That’s what our H3™ method is for.

Every quote is built for the project, because the variables move a great deal. It depends on how many stakeholder groups and in how many countries, whether we’re reading one audience or the whole map around you, how hard those groups are to reach, which is very different for retail customers than for regulators, institutional investors or a community that has already had a bad experience with your industry, whether the work sits inside your own organisation or has to reach a company you don’t own yet, whether there’s a live decision with a date on it, and what you need in your hands at the end. A perception audit with four stakeholder groups in one market and a cultural due diligence on a cross border acquisition are different projects with very different numbers. Most of our projects sit in the six-figure range. We scope after a proper conversation about the decision you’re making, and you get a fixed price and a timeline before any work begins.

We’d start from what you already have, because it’s usually well built and incomplete in one specific way. A tracker and an engagement survey both measure things people are willing to put in writing for an organisation that is asking, and they measure them accurately. What neither can do is tell you why the number is where it is, because that reasoning isn’t something a scale can hold. There’s also a layer underneath both of them that a questionnaire can’t reach at all: the assumptions people share about how things really work here, which nobody states because everybody already agrees on them. Ask about those directly and people will sincerely describe the stated policy instead, because from the inside an assumption isn’t an opinion, it’s just how things are. What we add is that layer, and the reason behind each score. We work with your existing instrument rather than replacing it, and you get your own data back with the explanation attached, plus the part it was never going to capture.

Yes, and for culture specifically that’s how you reach the layer that matters. It helps to separate two things that get used interchangeably. Climate is how people rate the policies and practices they can see, it moves in months, and a survey measures it well. Culture is the set of shared assumptions underneath, it moves in years, and people can’t describe it to you because they’re standing inside it. Reaching it is what social anthropology has done for a century: time on site, watching what actually happens rather than what gets reported, conversations that go where the person takes them, and attention to the moments where the stated value and the real rule pull in different directions. Those moments are where the culture becomes legible. In practice, much of what decides behaviour turns out to be something people learned by watching what happened to a colleague, and it tends to beat the written policy. None of that arrives by email.

Yes, and it’s worth being precise about how, because the honest answer includes a limit. Before signing, there’s no walking into the target: access is a data room, some management sessions and whatever the process allows. So the work is done from the outside, which is what commercial due diligence already does when it interviews the target’s customers. We work the ring around the company: former employees, customers, suppliers, distributors, people who compete with them, the trade conversation, and the management sessions you’re given. Ways of deciding leave traces outside the building, and the traces are consistent enough to read. What that gives you is which synergies in the model depend on people staying, agreeing or deciding a particular way, and which of those won’t survive contact. What it doesn’t give you is the granularity of a study run inside a company you already own. We’ll tell you which of the two you’re getting before we start.

Then we say so, and that’s a finding worth the fee. It happens more often than people expect in this category, usually in one of two ways. Sometimes the problem a board is worried about turns out to be contained inside one group with no reach into the ones that decide anything, in which case you’ve been saved a costly programme aimed at nobody. Sometimes the reputation is genuinely solid and the real risk is somewhere else entirely, which is a different and more useful piece of news. What we won’t do is manufacture a crisis to justify the project. It would be easy, because there’s always somebody unhappy somewhere, and it’s also the fastest way to lose a client we’d rather keep for a decade. A study that ends with "leave this alone and spend the money over there" is a good outcome, and we’ll be the first to say so.

Both, and the connection between them is what the firm is built on. We call it insight-led strategic intelligence because research earns its cost when it makes the strategy sound. In this category that means you get the evidence and what to do with it: where each group actually sits rather than one average, what drives the score in each of them and in their own words, which groups are moving and how fast, the assumptions people are really working by, where a change will stop travelling through your organisation and why it stops there, which targets and incentives contradict what you’re asking for, and what to act on first with the reasoning attached to each item. We build on what you already have rather than starting from zero. The point of all of it is that your company loses less time and money going in the wrong direction.

Abdo López and Norah Walsh lead every project in person, from the framing session to the final reading, and everyone working alongside them is senior, with more than a decade in the field. Around that core we build the team for the project. The person who can sit with plant operators on a shift isn’t the person who runs the stakeholder sampling, and interviewing a regulator is a different job from spending three weeks inside an engineering team, so we select the experts, the partners and the technology that fit the question, the technique, the country and the industry. There’s no handover to a junior once the contract is signed, and that’s the main reason we stay small.