Put a face to an e-commerce site, reputation expert advises

Consumers want to know who they’re doing business with, and that presents a special challenge for online retailers that don’t interact with customers face to face, says Anthony Johndrow, managing director of the Reputation Institute, a firm that advises companies on managing image. Personal touches and a clear message of what the online retailer is about can help, he says.

“In a store you can see happy workers or unhappy workers, but it’s difficult to see the human face of an online retailer,” Johndrow says. He says online retailers can improve their reputation by making it easy for customers to contact the retailer and by personal touches, such as by putting a note in each package from the person who prepared it offering ways the consumer can get service if necessary.

He also says online retailers should communicate the role they play in society and their financial strength. “People today don’t want to do business with a company they don’t know,” Johndrow says. “They need to feel there’s a substantial company that will be around and stand behind their products and services.”

Retailers in general fared better in the Reputation Institute’s 2009 U.S. Reputation Pulse survey of consumer views of 153 large U.S. companies. The retailer category scored 70.00 in 2009 up from 66.76 last year on a 100-point scale, which Johndrow says is a significant increase. Automotive and financial services companies fared worse this year, reflecting their battering in the current recession, he says.

Wal-Mart moved up the most among retailers, rising 12 points to 65.17 this year, an unusually large increase, Johndrow says. He attributes that to Wal-Mart going on a campaign to respond to charges it treats employees unfairly and to its low-cost image, which plays well in a tough economy. Discounter Costco Wholesale Corp. had the top score among retailers, 78.53, followed by Amazon.com Inc., the only web-only retailer in the study, at 75.74. Personal care products manufacturer Johnson & Johnson had the top score among U.S. companies at 83.58; the mean score for U.S. companies was 66.31.

While retailers may assume that consumers grade them primarily on the products and services they deliver, Johndrow says that makes up only 17.5% of the score survey respondents give retailers in the Reputation Pulse survey. He says a company’s perception as a good corporate citizen represented 15% of a retailer’s grade this year as did corporate governance. How good a place a company is to work at accounted for 14% of the reputation of retailers in this year’s survey, and financial performance 13%, up from 11.5% last year, a reflection of consumers’ concerns about doing business with companies that will survive the economic downturn. Leadership and innovation round out the seven dimensions Reputation Institute uses to rank companies.

Below are the scores for the 20 U.S. retailers surveyed that also appear in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, with the company’s score in the Reputation Pulse survey followed by its Top 500 ranking: