Why a Refresh of Corporate Reputation Drivers is Needed in 2026… and Other Reflections

By Caroline Skipsey, Vice President of Client Partnership & Strategic Advisory at Polecat

Going into December, for many of us, means reflection over the past year and all eyes on 2026 and beyond. From a Polecat perspective, our significant investment in AI over the past couple of years has made a huge difference this year in how our team and users can generate quick and accurate insights across our clients and partner teams.

Looking to the external world, alongside the ongoing global conflicts in Russia-Ukraine, Palestine-Israel, Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, and Haiti, we’ve seen a different sort of conflict in the boardroom. For much of the year, the team and our tech have been weaving more data into our products around themes such as geopolitics, resilience, headwinds, and adaptation - we’ve all seen these play out across communications and the media and stakeholder landscape. Financial performance and governance were more in focus for investors as businesses, and their leadership teams had little time to reflect and adapt to policy rollbacks, tariff wars, and supply chain disruption, whilst keeping their investors satisfied.

Much of our work across our corporate reputation clients has been in terms of refocusing more traditional reputation drivers to be more externally focused, with increased benchmarking across themes such as business and economic resilience and adaptation, supply chain vulnerabilities, trade disruption and tariffs, environmental and societal rollbacks, and the impact of AI.

Going into 2026, CEOs and their boards will continue to feel the pressure to outperform peers and challenging market and political conditions. An article last month in the Financial Times, CEOs don't call the shots, caught my eye and has stayed with me, because I think much of this year has seen boards having to battle against disruption and volatility caused by political figures, activist investors, and the speed of technological advancement. The Harvard Business Review also recently reported new research from The Conference Board that CEO turnover is accelerating in 2025, and it’s not primarily triggered by poor corporate performance.

Much of the reputation discussion that played out across media in 2025 concentrated on the increased political and economic risk that businesses were facing, but in the volume of content we were able to surface, the positive stories, often overlooked, were companies that have overcome and surpassed market expectations. I’m grateful that our products are able to quickly highlight to clients the positive steps companies have taken to operate responsible businesses in a chaotic and challenging external environment.

Figure 1 (below) highlights some of the challenges and successes faced by the FMCG industry, quickly surfaced by our PolecatX product.

Figure 2 (below) highlights that across the same group, companies have navigated positively throughout complicated themes such as DEI and restructures, and continue to be proactive in terms of sustainability initiatives and investment into brand and product innovation. For much of 2025, these achievements would be lost in a volume of media focused on the geopolitics of the day and market turmoil.

After spending the last 20 years using varying forms of data, platforms and primary research to analyse drivers of corporate reputation, issues, crises, PR disasters and executive and board effectiveness, I’ve a few headline reflections (there is a larger list building) around corporate reputation and how at Polecat we can continue to support leadership teams into 2026. I’m also thankful that our client team will be further supported by a tech and product team moving with such speed and agility.

1.         Reputation Drivers need to evolve with the external landscape

 Many of our clients measure their performance against peers and wider companies against key reputation drivers or pillars. Over the past decade I’ve seen the evolution of the more traditional drivers such as Financial Performance, Culture, Integrity, Leadership and Innovation. 

Around 2017 onwards, when I first started at Polecat, we were heavily monitoring ESG themes as policy and mandatory reporting evolved, and as our clients successfully pushed their environmental and societal targets through investment and action. Many companies evolved their reputation drivers over the past 10 years to incorporate these themes into reputation measurement and whilst the external political landscape is resulting in some companies reassessing targets and action, this is in contrast to companies across their markets facing business operations and their workforce directly impacted by climate and social risks including extreme weather, water scarcity and human rights violations.

In 2025, our clients have also further evolved their drivers to include more themes on resilience, geopolitical unrest, human capital, global trade, economic headwinds, digitisation and the impact of AI to reflect a more challenging and technology-focused business environment.

For 2026, many clients are changing the way they view corporate reputation, and we are adjusting our data and sources to reflect the ever-changing landscape. We will continue to ensure that drivers reflect the topics of the day, mapping to the external world and evolving our measurement and analysis with speed. We are offering a much broader views of markets of importance and widening our peer benchmarking. It’s not only important to track industry peers, but also companies who may similarly be sensitive to geopolitical volatility in markets of importance. So, ensuring that our clients can look at material issues or opportunities without a company lens or without a preconfigured constraint to a static peer-set is important. Our platforms have been further configured so that clients have the access to assess all companies and stakeholders of importance, without fear of hitting constraining data limits.

Sidenote - I still worry for companies who are restricted with their data to search volumes, that just doesn’t work when political headwinds cause a volume of commentary…

2.         I’ve been saying this for about 10 years but…Marketing and PR tools aren’t fit for purpose in the measurement of corporate reputation

We are coming up to 30 years since Gerald Ratner called his products “crap” destroying a $1 billion company and no doubt had his media and PR teams up through the night cutting out press clippings… but reputation is more complex now.

Share price views are now incorporated into PolecatX so we can see stakeholder perception against share price, in real time. This would have been useful for Gerald as he was making his speech in 1991, and perhaps, Elon Musk could have utilised this earlier in the year too.

Thankfully, technology has evolved, and we are no longer relying on analysing 000’s of social posts and aged media articles to evaluate perception. Often, media reports are only reflecting and commenting on what is currently happening...what is already out there. We are now able to pool primary research and stakeholder commentary to be viewed alongside media and social media providing one source of data.

Measuring reputation without stakeholder intelligence means large perception gaps in 2026. At Polecat over the past 3-4 years, our platforms are bringing in more stakeholder data across 000’s of political figures, governments, IGO’s, NGO’s, Think Tanks, Academics and Market commentators, as a broader view of commentary is required. This year, we’ve seen U.S. political figures (as an example) are a prime example of causing headwinds to a business and where teams are needing to report on reputational impact, not just the media.

3. AI, Automation, and People

Our client team is made up of colleagues from around the world and our clients are people too. There is pressure and a want (!) to automate to enable us to move quickly with insights and data but we also have to add context, explain and be accountable for the intelligence we share.

We care about the data put in front of clients. That means questioning the data that we are confident of, not just delivering charts without review. And whilst we’ve invested and have some amazing time-saving AI in our products, as a team, we are still querying data points, double-checking and taking the time to talk to each other and clients when we think that something looks “not quite right” or doesn’t align to a proof point that is needed. Automation is fantastic for mundane tasks – but that doesn’t let Polecats off the hook for adding context and our own insights to our data and analytics.