Brand and reputation management
The value of a strong brand is indisputable. A good reputation attracts business opportunities, partnerships and talent, and generates trust and loyalty among a company’s people, customers and other stakeholders. In that sense, a good reputation is directly reflected in the market valuation of a company. A strong reputation is also a good financial indicator of a company’s long-term prospects. It has been claimed that a good reputation takes centuries to create and days to dismantle. However, recent corporate examples demonstrate that a strong company brand provides some protection against negative events and critical issues. Stakeholders are more forgiving and tend to give companies with an established good reputation the benefit of the doubt. Such companies are more capable of fending off negative opinion and require a shorter time to recover from reputational damage in as far as they act in an open, honest and transparent way when handling a crisis.
For a company like Novo Nordisk, a good reputation is vital, being part of an industry that has been going through a reputational crisis. While on the rebound, the lack of trust in the general pharma industry is still creating barriers for companies and their licence to operate. To that end, Novo Nordisk established a new headquarter function to drive the company’s reputational value in December 2004. As Novo Nordisk is globalising its operations, and competition for share of voice increases, Executive Management recognised that the time was right for making a mark and realising the strong reputational value of the Novo Nordisk brand worldwide.
While Novo Nordisk is still among the most admired brands in Denmark, there is still a long way to go to position Novo Nordisk in the minds of important stakeholder groups worldwide. It is our ambition to become one of the most admired and agenda-setting healthcare companies worldwide. Our strength in reaching this ambition is our unique heritage, our Triple Bottom Line approach to doing business and our unwavering focus on diabetes.
Changing diabetes
In 2005, we launched a new global brand concept: changing diabetes – a unifying theme that expresses our vision and values. The brand promise underscoring the changing diabetes concept is that ‘Novo Nordisk is leading the fight against diabetes; defeating diabetes is our passion and our business’ – a statement extracted from Novo Nordisk’s Vision.
Four pilot markets are part of shaping the global strategy and have created better practice examples for other markets to follow. These are China, Germany, the UK and US.
Performance 2006
From a corporate branding perspective, 2006 was a critical year for Novo Nordisk. More than 30 markets worldwide actively implemented the changing diabetes concept in their markets. Even though the market activities have been different, they all contribute to showing our diabetes leadership and exemplify how we are changing diabetes.
Under the banner of changing diabetes, Novo Nordisk took active leadership in working towards a United Nations Resolution on diabetes in collaboration with the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) and its partners. Changing diabetes has been visibly exposed at international and regional diabetes congresses, including the American Diabetes Association (ADA) congress in Washington in June, the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) congress in Copenhagen in September, and the World Diabetes Congress held by the International Diabetes Federation in Cape Town in December. The Changing Diabetes concept allows for one consistent story to be told throughout all the company’s activities at these major congresses, where competition for share of voice is at its highest. In Copenhagen, for example, visitors were greeted throughout September at Copenhagen Airport with messages of changing diabetes, and these messages followed them into the centre of Copenhagen, to the Novo Nordisk exhibition booth and were part of Novo Nordisk’s stakeholder and awareness-raising activities throughout EASD. It was also during this congress that Novo Nordisk launched its global drive to change diabetes with the Changing Diabetes Bus. At the IDF congress in Cape Town, the bus was the central attraction in a Changing Diabetes Village outside the congress centre.
Changing diabetes is not only a way of communicating our leadership and commitment to defeating diabetes, but also an invitation to form partnerships. We perceive the global diabetes pandemic as our number one competitor, and it is our ambition to help rally the world to take action to defeat diabetes.
Reputation studies
Since 2005, we have worked with Reputation Institute to develop a reputation survey to be tracked over time.
The survey is conducted in selected countries among both employees and external stakeholder groups such as patients, diabetes specialists and general practitioners. Participants are asked to evaluate the reputation of Novo Nordisk and rate Novo Nordisk on a set of parameters related to themes such as market leadership, innovation, corporate responsibility, business ethics, products and services, and partnerships.
In 2006, the tracker study was revised slightly to accommodate some of the early conclusions from the baseline study performed in the autumn of 2005. As reputation is measured over the long term, it is not until the 2007 benchmark that we will have a valuable framework with which to track our reputation.
Novo Nordisk’s reputation has been consistently high among all surveyed stakeholders in the surveyed markets over the past two years. One of our goals is to maintain the high scores and work to ensure that employee reputation always stay a few points ahead of the external reputation to ensure the authenticity of the brand.
Novo Nordisk's approach
Leading international corporate branding academics have referred to Novo Nordisk's approach as ‘the second wave of corporate branding’. Furthermore, Copenhagen Business School and Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, have both used Novo Nordisk in a case study as an example of this approach.
Rather than pursuing a marketing and campaigning approach (the first wave), corporate branding at Novo Nordisk is a central and cross-disciplinary effort that seeks to establish cohesion between the company’s strategy, organisation and actions. The point of departure is that a strong corporate brand needs to be built from within, securing the involvement of Novo Nordisk’s 23,613 employees as brand ambassadors. At Novo Nordisk, the Corporate Branding function works in a matrix involving International Marketing, Corporate People & Organisation, Corporate Communications, Corporate Responsibility Management, Corporate Health Partnerships and affiliates. The changing diabetes brand concept works as a unifying theme that allows wide parts of the organisation to communicate the Vision and the values. Changing diabetes also serves as a beacon for strategic decisions and drives action in support of the Vision.
Building a winning reputation
Novo Nordisk follows a validated five-step approach to building its corporate branding.
Through profile-building activities and leadership communication, Novo Nordisk actively works to build recognition of how it is changing diabetes. By being transparent about its motives and conduct of affairs, Novo Nordisk seeks to instil trust and confidence among its stakeholders. Having taken a clear position as a company whose ambition is to change diabetes and ultimately defeat diabetes, Novo Nordisk seeks to claim a distinctive and differentiated position in the market place. This also allows for consistency in communicating the company’s 80-year heritage as a diabetes care company. Novo Nordisk regards the authenticity of its brand as one of the most critical components of a strong reputation. The philosophy is that it is the action and the people that drive the reputation.
Risk to reputation
The governance of a company’s reputational value and reputational risk is a matter for the Board of Directors and Executive Management. In Novo Nordisk, ‘ensuring superior company reputation’ is part of the company's Balanced Scorecard and thus also owned by all managers of Novo Nordisk worldwide.
As part of the Risk Management Board’s mandate, work was undertaken in 2006 to create a Novo Nordisk methodology for assessing and evaluating reputational risks. Reputational risk will form part of the Risk Management Board’s risk reporting to Executive Management and the Board of Directors.
This page has been assessed by PricewaterhouseCoopers as part of its assessment of Novo Nordisk’s statement that it reports ‘in accordance’ with GRI. Please refer to Audit and assurance for a full description of the nature of assurance offered.
