Uncovering the $7 trillion reputation economy

COREY DUBROWA:  Bob, I had boards and C-suites asking me like, “Hey. If this thing goes really sideways, what does it cost us?” Reputation is not an extra thing you bolt on at the last minute, and go, “Oh, shit. What if something goes wrong?” It’s a part of the process.

The entire world is reacting to the actions of this administration. Right? This administration is engaging like no other in history, not even the first instance of the Trump administration. The stakes are a lot higher. We knew they were a lot higher, but now we can actually affix a value to those stakes.

SAFIAN:  That’s Corey duBrowa, CEO of Burson, the global communications firm. At a time of incredible disruption from AI to ICE shootings in Minneapolis, I wanted to talk to Corey about the unprecedented reputation challenges facing businesses and brands. Corey’s pre-Burson roles included advising Howard Schultz at Starbucks, Marc Benioff at Salesforce, and Sundar Pichai at Google.

He talks about why reputation is still one of the most powerful and most misunderstood assets in business, and the high stakes decisions companies face right now about whether, when, and how to speak up.

Whether you’re leading a major business or contributing to a team, Corey offers great insights for navigating a volatile era. So, let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Corey duBrowa, CEO of Burson, the global communications agency. Corey, thanks for being here.

DUBROWA: Bob, thanks for having me. It’s great to see you in real life for the first time in 2026.

SAFIAN:  Yeah. I see you have your Seattle Seahawks hat on. You were saying you’re feeling a little FOMO about not being at the Super Bowl parade.

DUBROWA:  I’m feeling a huge amount of FOMO this morning. I, literally, before we got on was watching on Twitter, scrolling through crowd shots, and was just remembering the last Super Bowl parade that I was a part of, which was in Seattle, the Marshawn Lynch edition way back in the day when I worked at Starbucks. So, yeah. A little FOMO. The hat will have to tide me over for this morning.

SAFIAN:  Have to serve the function. Yeah.

DUBROWA:  I think so. Exactly.

Copy LinkHow companies are navigating political disruption

SAFIAN:  You took over at Burson in 2024. It’s just been wild times since then. Disruption everywhere, not because of you, of course, but do you–

DUBROWA:  Thank you for that clarification.

SAFIAN:  Do you long for the simpler days when you were in-house advising just one business like Starbucks and Google? Or does this perch give you a broader understanding of what’s going on in the landscape?

DUBROWA:  So, I had spent 15 years monomaniacally focused on one business, one client, one thing. Eight of those were at Starbucks, one of those was with Benioff at Salesforce, and then the last six were at Google.

What I found is that your focus tends to be a little bit lather, rinse, repeat, in the sense that you’re really focused on the message, the messenger, and the platform.

SAFIAN:  You’re trying to get everybody to say the same thing consistently over, and over, and over again.

DUBROWA:  You are. You’re very deep in that business, but sometimes you lack the periscope to put it up and determine what’s happening in the world. And I had forgotten how much fun it is to have such a liberal arts purview. So, I feel like I can actually still be helpful to our clients, but in a different way than when I was actually responsible for running the message, messenger, and platform.

SAFIAN:  You and I have talked privately in recent months about how hard it is in this environment for brands and leaders to figure out what to say, where the risks are, and where the opportunities are when so much seems like it’s up in the air. Is that what you’re hearing from your clients? They’re asking, looking, or trying to find that clarity?

DUBROWA:  Yeah. 100%, Bob. We’re in year two of Trump’s second presidency. And so, there’s renewed protectionism. Certainly, tariffs are one aspect of this. Deregulation, the America First Trade Policy. And so, helping companies to navigate these shifting priorities, and be thinking about global trade, and, frankly, regulatory uncertainty, that’s one thing.

There’s been a global shift to the right. And so, there’s a conservative resurgence across Japan, France, Germany, UK, to name but a few. And so, helping clients to be able to, again, navigate that volatility, that societal polarization that everybody is dealing with.  We, in this country, because we pay attention to our own news, we’ll be focused on things like Minnesota, but you could also point to Iran, Gen Z-led protests across Asia, budget protests in Bulgaria, which were huge, and probably not on most people’s radar here.

So, guiding clients through social listening and activist engagement and brand neutrality. How do you stand for things without necessarily putting yourself in the line of fire? Like, that’s a thing. There’s the global AI governance race. There’s competing rules about how to shape AI’s futures. It was so fascinating, to me, to watch Google, of all companies, a company that has never really lacked for resources go into the bond market, and raise more than $30 billion worth of 100 year debt. That’s a whole new thing.

SAFIAN:  Yes.

DUBROWA:  Because AI is expensive. And so, how that’s governed and the way that investments work in that world is a whole separate thing. There’s erosion of trust in traditional media. The Washington Post, you and I both have friends at the Post.

SAFIAN:  Yes.

DUBROWA:  A third of their staff is gone. And so, at the same time that only 28% of U.S. adults trust mainstream media — this was the Gallup poll that came out last year. That number was in the 70s in the ’70s. 72% in 1972.

Copy LinkErosion of media trust & the rise of company-owned storytelling

SAFIAN:  Yeah. Because it’s all fake news now. Right? You don’t know who to trust. Even the entities that are financially solvent, people have very strong feelings about.

DUBROWA:  Absolutely. And what we’re observing more and more, Bob, I, certainly, saw it at Davos, and I saw it again with the Super Bowl.  Four in 10 U.S. adults, according to that same Gallup poll, get their news from digital influencers, right? And I’m not saying influencers are fake news at all. Many of them, frankly, come from the world of traditional media.

But the fact that the trust is so upside down now where you have fewer than one in three Americans saying they trust traditional media forms, you realize that company-owned media channels and storytelling are becoming more important than they ever have been.

Clients have to navigate all of this at the same time that they’re thinking about things like the erosion of institutional credibility, their own institutions, not necessarily conferring confidence in the AI. For all the advantages that it has, it actually amplifies mis and disinformation at scale.

And so, I think there’s a lot for clients to wrap their heads around, and that’s the job that we have is helping them to navigate a very confusing, and, frankly, pretty fragmented landscape.

Copy LinkThe eight levers of reputation for business leaders

SAFIAN:  As you go through all of these disruptions and changes, in some ways, it’s a great time to be in the business you’re in, because you’re needed more, and the stakes have never been higher. But, at the same time, the pressure’s also never been higher. Right? There is more that is at risk based on the way you communicate than it ever has been before.

DUBROWA:  That’s totally true. For 15 years as a client, Bob, I had boards and C-suites asking me like, “Hey. If this thing goes really sideways, what does it cost us?” Or, “If this thing goes really well, this initiative, what’s the upside for us?” And so, we, at Davos, launched a study that proves that corporate reputation actually has quantifiable value, that companies with strong reputations realized almost 5%, 4.78% unexpected additional shareholder returns creating a reputation economy that’s worth almost $7 trillion. The stakes are a lot higher. We knew they were a lot higher, but now we can actually affix a value to those stakes.

SAFIAN:  Like, what defines a strong reputation in this environment?

DUBROWA:  For years, I think we have been told, or it was received wisdom that there was this binary relationship of trust. Like, to be trusted or not trusted. And what I always knew is that reputation was actually comprised of different things. There’s a lab within the University of Oxford that helped us to develop this model. It takes into account eight different levers that comprise modern reputation.

Citizenship, the degree of good that a company may or may not do in the world, but also creativity. How creative are your solutions? Governance, the structures and policies and integrity that help the company to be managed. Innovation, how forward-thinking are you? What new technologies or ideas are you putting forth? Leadership, how you manage at scale, the way that you navigate things. Performance, the financial results. Products, the quality, reliability, and perception of your products.

And maybe more importantly, although, I’m not sure it gets the play that it should, workplace. The culture, the wellbeing of your employees, the way that you manage talent.

So, if you think about how companies manage these eight levers, it’s pretty bespoke. Right? Like, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all model for every company.  Like, the way Starbucks would have thought about these eight levers would be pretty profoundly different than the way that Google would think about those eight levers.

SAFIAN:  The lens of this research was around financial impact. But do business leaders have a responsibility to think beyond just financial impact? Is there a connection between reputation and courage?

DUBROWA:  Every company has the opportunity, and, frankly, responsibility to think about among these eight levers how they show up. Right? It’s your citizenship, how creative or innovative you are, the products or services you put out in the marketplace. You, as a company, have to determine what is your unique value that you can offer in that space, and the extent to which you really choose to pull that lever hard or don’t pull that lever hard.

Because citizenship is one of these eight levers, I think all companies have both an opportunity to think about that, and also some risks attached to that. They have to think about, “Are we picking a side?” A political side. Or, “Are we doing something that may really please our employees, but for our customer base it may be a different thing?”

So, this gets into the whole realm of stakeholder management, the way you start to think about the actions that you take.  Because you only really get to communicate, Bob, after you’ve taken action. Your actions give you the hall pass to communicate, and those actions, sure, they can very well be related to things like corporate citizenship out in the world, but you have to be mindful of the way that people are receiving things.

So, the way, Bob, that we did things at Starbucks back in the mid 2010s, in a different political environment with a different administration, would be received I suspect in a very different way in this administration, in this year of our Lord 2026, compared to what we did then.

SAFIAN:  Choosing to do exactly the same things. And you might not necessarily choose to do them the same way, because of that environment.

DUBROWA:  Exactly. Or you might choose to communicate about them in a different way. Context matters. Right? And so, I think you have to start thinking about things like context and the actions in that context before you’re thinking about message. The message is almost the last thing that you’re thinking about.

Copy LinkHow the Trump administration is like “no other in history”

SAFIAN:  You mentioned stakeholders. For some business leaders today, their public communication often seems targeted to an audience of one in the White House. Some CEOs want to, at least, appear to cooperate with this administration. A few seem prepared to push back. And most, seemingly, want to hide. Am I being too simplistic about it?

DUBROWA:  I don’t know that you are. I think the influence of this administration has been immense in terms of the global order.  You don’t have to go to Davos. It helped, for me, to see it that way. But the entire world is reacting to the actions of this administration. Right? So, you look at tariffs, you look at a president who is tweeting about Greenland before he even arrived to give his speech.

You really start to realize this administration is engaging like no other in history, not even the first instance of the Trump administration. You can’t debate the influence that’s being wielded by this White House.

So, from a business standpoint, as a business leader, I think for companies maybe it’s not so much about being pro-Trump, or anti-Trump, as it is about being pro-business continuity in this hyper-polarized world. Right?

SAFIAN:  How do you maintain that continuity when there are all these changes going on around you?

DUBROWA:  Every day gives a new wrinkle in how to manage continuity with policies that can change. They’re mutable. Right? They’ve evolved from day-to-day, or week-to-week, or month-to-month. And so, sometimes silence can be a calculated strategy to protect the brand and the bottom line, and other times it’s simply because that company doesn’t have anything meaningful to say on that topic.

Dara mentioned this, I think in your podcast from last week.  I’ll take a different spin on it, but I think companies have to be thinking about, what are their values? What do they stand for? What are the immutable truths of that company that have been true since it was founded? P&G when they were first founded – by and large, those things are still true. Certainly, Starbucks, the mission statement may have changed, but the objectives are still the same. For our friends at Adidas, it would be the same thing. Right?

If it’s not a meaningful connection to you, to your brand, to your values, to your mission, then you have to seriously question like, “Well, why are you in the business of talking about that then?”

SAFIAN:  Corey is getting right to the heart of it, and, actually, he’s just warming up. Next we talk about corporate reactions to ICE activities in Minneapolis, how AI is impacting the reputation of tech companies, and more. That’s after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break, Corey duBrowa of Burson talked about the importance of reputation in today’s charged business marketplace. Now we talk about the letter that 60 Minnesota companies signed responding to ICE activities in Minneapolis, how AI is impacting stories Silicon Valley tells about itself, and what each of us can do to safeguard our own personal reputations, plus, stories from inside Salesforce and Google. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkReacting to the de-escalation letter from 60 Minnesota companies

There’s been activity or communications that in some ways has been performative. Thinking of a conversation I had with Ken Frazier at one point where he said, “Well, listen, if you believe in something, only when it doesn’t cost you anything then it’s not really a core value.” And I guess I wonder how you have those conversations with clients, with CEOs, with leaders about what are the things that are immutable for you?

DUBROWA: It’s the same as talking about reputation in the sense that it is a – it’s almost like a pie chart, right? You’re not looking at something binary, trusted, not trusted. Citizen, not citizen. You’re really looking at something that has more nuance to it than that.

I think you and I both know that nuance doesn’t travel very effectively on the internet. It doesn’t travel very effectively in today’s world. But I think most business leaders have learned that the era of commenting on each and every social or news event has passed. Right? And I think for the most part companies are relieved, but it doesn’t necessarily mean staying mute in the face of major events.

So, as we’ve seen even pretty recently in Minneapolis or Minnesota, and you look at this letter, there were different views on the letter. Right? Some people thought that it was pretty performative, pretty weak, didn’t say a whole lot, that it really didn’t have much teeth, and there’s probably some validity to that.

But I think the fact that you had companies willing as a cohort, in a pack, to speak up about something that was meaningful to them, meaning their local community, the place where their employees live, work, connect with one another, that’s smart business I think for those companies. It’s not performative. Maybe it wasn’t as strong as people would have liked for it to be, given the stakes, given what had happened in Minneapolis.

SAFIAN:  I had a private exchange with a CEO in Minneapolis just when the letter came out, and I was like, “It’s pretty lame. It’s not really getting into anything harsh.” And this person said, “Maybe, but getting a whole group of people to agree to anything these days, and to do it publicly is a bigger deal than it might seem like.”  They all banded together. Did you get called in at all on these discussions around it?

DUBROWA:  Oh, we, certainly, advised clients who signed up as a part of the letter. And I think to your point any time you’re doing something in a cohort, or as a collective, there are going to be edges to that conversation. Right? So, there will be companies who believe that it wasn’t strong enough or companies who barely made it to the table as it was.

Like, to me, that letter was a good sign in the sense that, exactly to the point of the person that you were speaking with, getting that many people to sign onto something that, at least, pointed in a direction of saying like, “We disagree with the way that you are handling immigration and the way that you’re standing up a presence in our community,” – that is a start, the start of a much longer and more meaningful conversation as opposed to the finale or some sort of bookmark that says, “There. We’ve done our bit, and we can peace out.” I don’t think most companies thought of it that way.

Copy LinkCould corporate America become a target in the midterms?

SAFIAN:  Your reputation report also warns that corporate America overall could be a target heading into the midterms. The billion heroes of business are also villains. Right? Like, how concerned should leaders be about that? And what can they do?

DUBROWA:  I think it’s a very real thing. If I go back in time to my time at Starbucks, I had never experienced a personal death threat before for doing my job. I did then. I did at Google too. And I wasn’t the only one.

The first conversation that I ever had with the late Susan Wojcicki, literally, the first conversation I ever had when I was at Salesforce and I was interviewing for the Google job, and she very, sort of, secretly came up to me, because she was on the Salesforce board.   So, at lunch, she snuggled up to me and was just like, “I hear Sundar wants to talk to you. He’s great. You should go talk to him.”

And I asked her about the shooting at YouTube. They had had an active shooter in their building in northern California, and that it was known that the shooter was looking for her, personally. And her view of it was pretty sanguine. She was like, “We’re here because we have a creator community to look after. I have an employee base that I’m responsible for looking after.”

She was very focused on the safety of others, which I thought was incredible. She was a remarkable person, and that, for me, was the first thing where I took a step back, and I was like, “Maybe this is what leadership looks like.” Right? When you’re constantly having to juggle this idea of exposure, social exposure, real life exposure, reputation exposure, and her first thought was about the safety of her people, the safety of her creators.

And so, I think that corporate America being a target, it’s not new, but I think we’ve seen shifts. And so, while every situation is unique, our general counsel for clients is to focus on stakeholders just like Susan was doing, employees, customers, investors.

And the goal isn’t to garner headlines, I don’t think, it shouldn’t be. It’s really staying consistent with your corporate and leadership values. You’re not scoring points. You’re managing a business. You’re managing your reputation. Those things are interconnected with one another.

Copy LinkInside the reputation of Silicon Valley and Big Tech

SAFIAN:  When I think about the reputation of not just Google, but Silicon Valley, and Big Tech overall these days, it’s, like, it’s gone through these ebbs and flows. There was a point where it was just adoration for a lot of those companies. And now the bigger they are, the more successful they are, it might be a little bit more mixed. Where do you see the reputation of Silicon Valley and Big Tech right now?

DUBROWA:  Well, it’s really interesting. To go back to the AI point that we were speaking about before, one thing that was totally clear to me at Davos was you couldn’t walk down the Davos plots, you couldn’t walk down the promenade without being bombarded by AI messages. Every company that had a storefront or a presence had a different AI message, whether it was, “AI is empowerment,” whether it was, “AI is simplicity,” whether it was, “AI is executing better at scale,” whatever your company’s message may be, you can do so much more than you ever could before with digital means.

But by the same token, with great power comes great responsibility. We value as a society, and, certainly, Silicon Valley values innovation, pushing ahead, breaking boundaries, getting to a new place as opposed to the kumbaya of getting everybody into the Minneapolis thing, getting everybody to agree on a difficult thing around a table and sign their name to it.  And I think, for Silicon Valley, that’s the challenge. It’s both the upside of the potential, and it is the potential downside of the risks that come from a world that’s catching up from a regulatory point of view, and sees that for every cool part of AI, there are some downsides.

Copy LinkHow Google CEO Sundar Pichai might view the OpenAI competition

SAFIAN:  I’ve always assumed that Google could have released a ChatGPT-like product earlier, but chose not to, because of reputational risks, which, of course, OpenAI as a newcomer didn’t worry about. Right? Did you have conversations about things like that, how to deal with those risks?

DUBROWA:  I’ll tell you the way that Sundar would think about this. Sundar would think about this more as an engineering problem to solve. So, sure. Reputation is wound up in, or bound up in the decisions that you make about the parameters of a product like that, if you think about Gemini, right? Maybe why it took a while for Gemini to get to the point where it was ready for mass consumption, and now you look at where Google is with Gemini. I think it’s pretty well-accepted across the industry that this version of Gemini is a considerable leap ahead of where ChatGPT is.

I think Google is playing a long game. And I think that Sundar thinks in longer terms than many of the people that do his job across the industry. And, in my experience, he’s thinking of it as an engineering problem to solve of which reputation is a part, but it is also user experience.

Reputation is not an extra thing you bolt on at the last minute and go, “Oh, shit. What if something goes wrong?” It’s a part of the process. When we saw the video of Nancy Guthrie’s assailant, prospective assailant, I don’t think we know exactly what it was, on the porch of her house through a Nest cam that she wasn’t a subscription consumer for, that is an example of Google doing something that I am certain, Bob, required engineering backflips that I can’t even get my head around. Right?

It’s backend data that’s collected in an ambient way that probably took considerable resources to find, and here’s Google being helpful and saying like, “Look, we have the means to do it.” And so, I think that helpfulness comes from this combination idea of beautiful design that works at scale that also manages the reputational risks and upside in any given product. It’s true across everything from cloud to YouTube to Gemini.

Copy LinkThe evolving power of storytelling in Silicon Valley

SAFIAN:  When you mentioned Sundar’s engineer’s perspective, it makes me think, certainly, earlier in days in Silicon Valley, storytelling wasn’t necessarily prized, the communication was like, “The product speaks for itself in a lot of ways.” And that engineering mindset, obviously, still exists. For you, as someone who is there to help craft a story, help reinforce the story, is that frustrating or do you feel like, “No. This community has figured this out. They know they need to be better storytellers”?

DUBROWA:  I think, Bob, they’re figuring it out. I think that the idea of story as being the way that you can best connect the innovation that you’re developing, and the audiences that you intend it for, story is the bridge between those things.

I, certainly, think that the Valley, generally speaking, has gotten better at that. Is it perfect? Probably not. I think there are examples, you and I could both pick them pretty easily, of stories that feel pretty ham-handed, or maybe they feel pretty self-serving.

The interesting thing about Sundar, he is a gifted storyteller. It does help. I think that his ability to connect intent with impact, “We intend to help you. Here is what it means,” it does give a company like Google a leg up reputationally I think.

SAFIAN:  Your own reputation has remained strong through a lot of career shifts and moves. What kind of advice do you have for business folks who are listening about how they protect and manage their own personal reputation?

DUBROWA:  Well, I don’t know, Bob, that I would be the one to give a lot of advice there. I’m a teacher’s kid from Long Beach, California. Right? So, I spent eight years on some form of public assistance, like, when I was first growing up. Because we have never paid teachers what they were worth. Right?

So, I just try to never forget that. I just try to hold onto that. And I think if you’re too worried about reputation through the various chapters of your life, you’re fussing with things that are not true. But if you’re just focused on where you came from, who you really are, who your people are, then that feels, to me, like, a more solid foundation to come back to.

Copy LinkWhat’s at stake for business leadership now?

SAFIAN:  We started by talking about how challenging the past year has been. You were also on the frontlines of crises at Google during the pandemic. How does this period of disruption feel compared to those pandemic days? And what’s at stake for business leadership now?

DUBROWA: The pandemic days were just so anomalous, right? Like, it was hard to wrap your head around the idea of being disconnected from everyone. Managing in that environment, you’re looking for different signals I think. You and I, having this conversation here online, I was trying to learn to pay more attention to facial expressions and we probably were all in our heads about what we were texting one another, because that was the lifeline we had. We were missing body language.

And so, you fast-forward to today, and you’re like, “Well, we’re back in that in-real-life world again, but it’s so much more complicated now.” The multiplicity – I’m trying to remember at Davos what they were calling it. I guess it was polycrisis, the idea that there’s so many things coming at people at the same time that it’s almost impossible for the human brain to discern well. How do you parse the landscape in a way that makes sense?

So, to me, we learned some interesting things during the pandemic about how to take care of each other at a distance. I sent one of my people home from Google. She was really excited to move to the UK. She was living in a city she didn’t know with people she didn’t know. She was brand-new. She was stuck in her apartment block with a medical condition. And I was just having a one-on-one with her, and I was like, “How do you feel about going home? How do you feel about just picking up and coming back?”

And it was the best decision I think that she and I could have made for her mental health, for her wellbeing, and all that. But it was hard. Right? Like, this was her dream, and it wasn’t working. And so, we needed to make a different decision.

And so, I think you take lessons from that experience, and that empathy, that button that we pushed 1,000 times a day, sometimes during the pandemic, and you try to apply it to a world that seems less empathetic, less sympathetic, less connected to one another.

It’s weird in real life to be even more fragmented and more polarized than we were even online, but that’s a fact. And so, those are the lessons I try to draw from. It was the, “You’ve got to remember the empathy, and you’ve got to remember that at the end of the day we’re trying to be in service of this idea of being helpful.”

SAFIAN:  And today’s lessons in some ways are the same, that it is about empathy, that you go back to that same core.

DUBROWA:  Totally. Different landscape. Different set of circumstances. Different president. Different world leadership. Different challenges. Same lessons. You’re just looking for different applications of those lessons.

SAFIAN:  Well, Corey, as always, great to chat with you, and thanks so much for doing this.

DUBROWA:  Bob, I really appreciate you asking me, and I hope I can come back.

SAFIAN:  Oh, yeah. We’ll have Corey back. While he can’t share all his private conversations, he gives us a window into how business leaders are thinking and acting and struggling. What stood out to me is Corey’s emphasis on context and on nuance, and on how it’s our actions that give us license to communicate effectively, crafting the perfect statement matters less than showing up authentically, and determining when you shouldn’t show up at all.

Reputations like financial results compound over time. They can also erode quickly. So, start by clarifying what you really stand for, and then act accordingly. The right messages will usually follow. That’s how to earn lasting trust in a world that’s constantly testing us.

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.