Burson has launched Reputation Capital, an AI-driven platform and consultancy designed to link reputation with tangible business outcomes such as stock price movements, sales, or consumer intent.

This new offering marks a significant advancement in how reputation is quantified, monitored and strategically managed.

The solution enables businesses to track reputational shifts in real time, identify their impact on key performance indicators, and respond with agility.

Available through WPP Open, the AI-powered marketing platform, Reputation Capital equips companies with the intelligence needed to make swift and informed decisions to strengthen their market position.

Unlike traditional methods, Reputation Capital offers a nuanced, real-time understanding of the complex drivers that shape corporate reputation.

The platform uses AI modelling to define and monitor eight core levers of reputation – such as social responsibility, innovation, and leadership – and forecasts how media narratives, news events, and brand actions affect each lever. The models process continuous streams of data from proprietary, digital, and social sources to generate a reputation score, identifying which specific areas require intervention to improve perception and drive business impact.

The technology also enables segmentation by geography, sector, reputation lever, and audience to pinpoint emerging risks and opportunities. This capacity to forecast reputational outcomes at scale makes Reputation Capital a powerful tool for both public and private enterprises.

The platform’s analytics can assess reputational data for thousands of global brands. Early modelling in the technology sector demonstrated that reputation shifts could contribute up to 0.97% in additional weekly returns, translating to shareholder value increases between USD 2.5 billion and USD 38 billion depending on the company. In one instance, a 1% improvement in a company’s Reputation Capital score led to a USD 2.4 billion gain in shareholder value.

This direct correlation between reputation and financial performance is central to Burson’s proposition. The platform provides clear evidence of how attributes such as integrity, governance, and creativity influence shareholder returns and equips brands to optimise their reputational assets for ROI.

Reputation Capital integrates into Burson’s broader Innovation Portfolio – a suite of AI-powered solutions designed to deliver better insights, targeted messaging, and culturally relevant creativity at speed. Its development was validated by Augmented Intelligence Labs, a University of Oxford enterprise, and incorporates elements of Burson’s proprietary cognitive AI tool, Decipher, built in partnership with Limbik.

According to Augmented Intelligence Labs, Reputation Capital is one of the most comprehensive and actionable tools available for understanding and leveraging reputation. The platform is intended to help C-suites and boards move beyond qualitative reputation metrics, offering predictive intelligence that transforms perception into a measurable and competitive business asset.

Corey duBrowa, global CEO, Burson, said, “Our core belief at Burson is that reputation is the most valuable asset that any organisation possesses. It’s complex and constantly evolving, influenced by a variety of factors beyond any singular element such as trust. Traditional tools for measuring and shaping reputation simply can’t keep pace with the velocity and volume of challenges our clients are navigating today. With Reputation Capital, we're pinpointing the specific drivers of reputation, forecasting the impact of potential actions, connecting these insights directly to business outcomes, and pairing them with expert counsel. This empowers our clients to make informed decisions with speed and agility, ensuring their actions and communications positively impact corporate perception and business performance and ultimately build a lasting competitive advantage in the marketplace.”

Deepshikha Dharmaraj, CEO, Burson Group India, added, “We have always known and demonstrated the impact of reputation on business. But now, Reputational Capital gives us a more tangible, AI-powered solution for understanding and even predicting that impact. It empowers us to move beyond traditional metrics, providing clients with a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between reputation and business performance. And we are then pairing these insights with expert counsel, and helping clients make their reputation a competitive advantage.”