An executive has two primary responsibilities: secure revenue and protect the reputation of the organization. Interestingly, there can be tension between these two responsibilities, as the lure of budget cuts for shareholders often conflicts with the need to meet customer expectations.

So who is fundamentally responsible for corporate reputation? Traditionally, organizations have delegated this responsibility to their Corporate Communications or PR teams. However, corporate reputation isn’t solely determined by PR pros (although they’re major influencers) – it’s more often shaped by the business decisions made every day by an organization.

Reputation management is all about understanding perceptions and using that insight to shape a company’s actions and decisions. Let’s look at an example.

Recently, a Papa John’s employee was fired for printing a racial slur on a customer receipt at one of the chain’s NYC restaurants. The customer, Minhee Cho, posted a photo of the receipt and tweeted about it. As expected, Papa John’s took swift action – publicly apologizing for the incident and firing the employee in question.

In situations like the one above, it will be the after-the-fact business decisions made that will greatly affect an organization’s corporate reputation. The entire organization, from the top-down and the bottom-up, needs to understand these decisions and the follow-up actions being taken to address the backlash.

Corporations use logic in the boardroom to make business decisions but consumers use emotion to make judgments about businesses. Companies must identify this gap and understand the implications when developing their corporate strategy. When an issue arises, companies must provide assurance to its customers that the company can exercise judgment and will act in their best interests.

Papa John’s needs to deal with this issue on a broad scale, reiterating to its employees their customer service protocols and best practices. Most importantly, the organization should focus on preventing this sort of thing from happening again.

In today’s fast-paced world of information delivery, companies need enterprise tools to help them identify and figure out whether stakeholders trust them; what drives this trust; and what leads to customer outrage. To properly build and protect corporate reputation, organizations need to fully utilize these tools to allow them to focus on building enterprise-wide reputation competence.

An organization’s corporate reputation exists in the actions of its employees and the perceptions of its customers. Each corporate action should focus on securing trust equity in the mind of its stakeholders and the impact of these decisions should be closely tracked, measured and understood by its executives and Communications professionals.

Organizations need to continually focus on the role that trust plays in revenue and reputation. Only by recognizing that corporate reputation exists in the many and not in the few will companies be able to truly protect their brand. Corporate reputation is hard to build and easy to destroy.