Industry experts have stressed the need for Nigerian businesses to prioritise reputation management for long-term sustainability.

They made this call during a recent webinar titled “Protecting Your Organisation’s Reputation: The Critical Role of Risk Identification and Management’, organised by the National Planning Committee of the Nigeria Public Relations Week 2025 in collaboration with Drawbridge CM.

According to a statement, the President and Chairman of the Council, Nigerian Institute of Public Relations, Dr Ike Neliaku, noted the growing importance of reputation management, brand identity, and dependability at the webinar.

“So, does reputation matter? Yes, reputation matters indeed because it underpins stakeholder trust. It sustains brand identity,” Neliaku asserted. “It drives customer dependability. For customers to depend on you, they will depend on you because they know that you have them at heart.”

Neliaku noted that companies could lose up to nine per cent of their annual turnover following reputation damage, especially from data privacy or ethics crises.

He cited a report by Cyber Magazine, adding, “Indeed, there is a global average loss of $79m per incident of reputation, data or ethics crisis.”

The NIPR president advised organisations to integrate reputation risk management into their broader enterprise risk frameworks, warning that “the future of reputation protection lies in collaboration, proactive planning and strategic integration.”

Meanwhile, the President of the Nigerian Chartered Risk Management Institute, Dr Ezekiel Oseni, described reputation risk as the “biggest, most unvalued, most unquantified, and most expensive risk to manage.”

Oseni explained further: “When you check your finances, your biggest asset could be your land and property. It could be something else which you can quantify, but reputation risk, you cannot put a figure to it. It can make the entire business go down.”

Also, the Chairman and Group Chief Executive Officer of TPT International, Adetokunbo Modupe, urged business owners to view reputation as critical capital.

“Business owners should be concerned about reputation and risk because reputation is capital. As a major asset, reputation collapses without trust,” Modupe urged.

He warned that a compromised reputation could erode profitability, revenue, and stock value, stressing, “Reputational risk is ever present in all businesses, organisations and human activities.

“What is important is our understanding and appreciation of these risks by minimising the risk potential and placing a culture or strategy of mitigation when it does happen.”

Lead Consultant, Drawbridge CM, Hassan Abdul, concluded the session by highlighting the need for proactive risk identification.

Abdul affirmed that “organisations must prioritise (risk identification and management) to protect their reputation and maintain stakeholder trust.”