Explore how leader brands shape corporate reputation, why they create risks, and how businesses can protect trust during a leadership crisis.
‘When a leader becomes the brand, their story becomes the company’s story. That is the bargain, in good times and in bad.’
Like most people in marketing, I have spent this week reading about Nvidia and its chief executive, Jensen Huang. I will leave the facts to the investigators. The board has an independent review underway, and much of what has been reported is still alleged. What has stayed with me is a different question, one I suspect many of us have asked ourselves quietly: what would I do on Monday morning if this were my company?
I should be honest at the outset. I am not a crisis management specialist, and I would be wary of anyone who claims to have a formula for a situation like this. But I have spent more than three decades in communications, PR and brand, and I have sat in enough rooms where the plan stopped working to know that the hardest moments are rarely the ones in the playbook. This one was well out of syllabus. So this is less advice than an attempt to think it through.
The strength
Few companies have been as closely tied to one person as Nvidia has been to Huang. The leather jacket, the long keynotes, the founding story that began in a Denny’s booth. For years, he has been the simplest way for the world to understand a company whose products most people will never see or touch. That did not happen by accident. It is one of the more effective pieces of brand building of our time.
We build leader brands deliberately, and for good reasons. People trust people more than they trust logos. A founder with a clear point of view gives a company a voice, gives journalists a story and gives investors someone to believe in. A strong leader can carry a company through a bad quarter, a delayed product or a hostile market. Many of us in marketing spend a good part of our working lives building exactly this.
The fragility
The same concentration that makes a leader brand powerful also makes it fragile. When the leader is the brand, the leader’s judgement, private life and blind spots all become brand risks. And unlike a faulty product, you cannot recall a person.
We have seen this play out before, in different ways.
B. Ramalinga Raju was one of the most admired names in Indian IT. Satyam was, for many people, simply his company. When he confessed in January 2009 to inflating the accounts for years, the brand could not survive him. It took a takeover by Tech Mahindra and a new name before customers and employees were willing to trust it again, and eventually the Satyam name disappeared altogether.
Travis Kalanick’s aggression was once celebrated as the reason Uber grew so fast. In 2017, the same culture became the story: a former engineer’s account of harassment, a consumer boycott, a video of him arguing with one of his own drivers. He stepped down that June. His successor spent years separating the company from the image of its founder. Uber survived, but only because the business was larger than the man and the board was willing to make a difficult call.
Adam Neumann sold a vision so persuasively that WeWork was at one point valued at around 47 billion dollars. When the 2019 IPO filing put his governance and conduct under public scrutiny, the story unravelled within weeks. The listing was pulled, he left, and four years later, the company filed for bankruptcy. Here, the leader was not just the face of the brand. He was the reason anyone believed in the business model at all.
What separates these outcomes is not how serious the original problem was. It is how much of the company’s credibility rested on one person, and whether there was anything else to stand on when that person became the problem.
Also read: How Does Brand Security Protect Daily Retail Sales From Digital Threats?
What I think our role is
Thinking through these cases, a few things seem to matter. None of them is new. Most of them have to be done long before anything goes wrong.
Build a brand that can stand without its leader. This does not mean diminishing the founder. It means letting customers, engineers, partners and the work itself tell the story too, and having more than one credible voice who can speak for the company. Nvidia’s products will keep selling. What is at risk is trust, and trust that rests on one person has nowhere else to go.
Agree in calm times who decides what in a crisis. The worst moment to discover that the general counsel, the board and the communications team want different things is late at night with a journalist’s deadline approaching. When the leader is the subject of the crisis, the communications function cannot take instructions from the leader alone. This is the uncomfortable part of being a brand custodian. Our responsibility is to the institution and the people who depend on it. Most of the time, that is the same as loyalty to the leader. Occasionally, it is not, and it helps to have thought about that before the day arrives.
Say what you know, admit what you do not, and be careful with certainty. In the first days of a crisis, every line is quoted for months afterwards. The instinct to reassure markets quickly is understandable, and often necessary. Still, it helps to leave some room for what is not yet known, and to make sure the leader and the company are speaking with one voice.
Start with your own people. Huang wrote first to his employees, and I think that instinct was right. Employees hear the news at the same time as everyone else, and their families and friends ask them about it at dinner. If they feel informed and respected, they become the company’s steadiest voices. If they feel they are the last to know, they become its most credible critics.
Separate the personal from the corporate, and know where you cannot. A leader’s family is entitled to privacy, and it is not a brand team’s job to pass moral judgement. Our job is to protect the trust that customers, employees and investors have placed in the company. Where private conduct touches that trust, as it does when questions of security or governance arise, it stops being private and has to be addressed honestly.
Accept that recovery runs on behaviour, not statements. Reputations are repaired by what a company does over the following months: what the investigation finds, what changes as a result, and whether people can see those changes. No press release shortens that time.
The bargain
I would still build leader brands. A company with a human face is more relatable, more trusted and usually more interesting than one without. But a leader brand is a bargain. You borrow credibility from one person, and if that person stumbles, the debt comes due all at once.
As brand custodians, our job is to enjoy the benefits of that bargain while quietly making sure the company has other foundations. Ideally, nobody notices that work. When it is needed, it is what holds the company together.
– Written by Kavita Rao, the Global Chief Marketing Officer of Findability Sciences, with over three decades of experience across marketing, communications, brand, reputation and people leadership. She writes about brands, technology, leadership and sustainable business.
