The PR industry has always talked about trust. Well, 2025 was the year trust started answering back.
Reputation stopped behaving like something you could manage neatly through channels, stakeholder maps and quarterly messaging plans. It became visceral. Emotional. Public. And often unforgiving.
This was the year when companies learned, again, that reputation is not something you own. It is something other people decide, based on what you do when it matters.
Looking back at 2025, three themes defined the reputational landscape. Each points directly to where we think 2026 is heading and where many businesses may be underprepared.
Three corporate reputation truths from 2025
1. Purpose only worked when it showed up in real decisions
The lazy version of purpose finally collapsed under its own weight.
Plenty of businesses, either feeling the pressure from MAGA/Reform or using it as cover, backtracked on purpose and other ‘woke’ commitments such as DEI, thus revealing that their purpose was never worth its weight in hot air and their commitments were superficial.
In 2025, saying the ‘right’ things stopped being enough (this is a good thing). Companies with strong reputations were those whose values were visible in pricing, products, policies and trade-offs. Purpose became less about narrative and more about evidence.
This is why brands with a consistent, lived-through set of values continued to outperform reputationally, particularly in moments of stress. When a crisis hit, they were not scrambling to invent credibility. They were spending it.
We saw this clearly with companies such as Marks & Spencer, whose longstanding reputation for quality and customer respect allowed it to shift the tone of a potential crisis into something human and disarming. Likewise Octopus Energy proved, yet again, that fairness and service are not soft ideals but hard-edged competitive advantages, even in a sector people love to hate.
The lesson was simple: profit does not follow purpose. Profit follows credible purpose, repeatedly demonstrated.
2. Reputation became the difference between resilience and fragility
2025 made one thing painfully clear. Reputation is not about being liked when times are good. It is about being believed when times are hard.
Companies that had invested in trust over years were able to absorb shocks without reputational freefall. Those that treated reputation as surface-level comms found that it evaporated the moment pressure was applied.
This is not theoretical. It played out in real time across sectors, from retail to energy to tech. Reputation acted as a buffer, buying organisations time, goodwill and permission to act.
And importantly, people did not separate “corporate behaviour” from “consumer impact”. When prices rose, services failed or policies shifted, audiences judged intent as much as outcome. Who are you helping? Whose side are you on?
Which brings us to the third truth…
3. Challengers kept winning because they made life easier, not louder
In a year defined by exhaustion, inflation and information overload, the brands that earned affection were those that reduced friction.
This is why challengers continued to reshape entire categories. Aldi and Lidl did it by making food shopping feel fair again. Decathlon and IKEA did it by democratising access to quality. Octopus Energy did it by proving that transparency and service can still win trust in a broken sector.
In reputational terms, being a haven in rough seas turned out to be a powerful position.
People were not looking for perfection. They were looking for reassurance and relief.
Three corporate reputation predictions for 2026
If 2025 stripped away comforting illusions, 2026 will accelerate three shifts that many organisations are still trying to wish away.
1. Corporate and consumer affairs will become indivisible
In 2026, the idea that “corporate” and “consumer” audiences can be managed separately will stop making sense altogether.
People do not switch identities when they clock in for work or log into an investor call. The same person who reads your annual report is scrolling TikTok that evening. The same person judging your CEO’s ethics is buying or boycotting your product.
This blurring is already visible in companies like Tesla, where leadership behaviour, product perception, investor sentiment and cultural politics collapse into a single, volatile reputational reality. Or Disney, whose clash with Florida’s government over social policy showed how quickly corporate positioning can become consumer-facing, politicised and emotionally charged. Nike, Patagonia and plenty of others all show the same thing in different ways: when leadership decisions, politics and culture collide, there is no such thing as a ‘corporate’ reputation and a ‘consumer’ reputation. There is just reputation, full stop.
The implication is profound. Messaging silos will break down. So will agency models built around them. The businesses that win will be those that accept a simple truth: there is no such thing as a purely corporate reputation anymore. There is only a human one.
2. AI will be exposed as a tool, not an answer
2026 will be the year many organisations quietly realise that AI does not have ‘answers’ to reputational questions, only inputs to a process that must be consultative and human-centric.
Yes, it will accelerate content production. Yes, it will optimise distribution. And yes, it will be everywhere. But it will not create trust (the opposite is likely to be true, particularly if LLMs are over- or misused). It will not substitute judgement. And it will not repair credibility gaps caused by weak decisions.
In fact, as synthetic content floods the zone, human signals will become more valuable, not less. Experience. Consistency. Proof. And critically, visible leadership behaving like real people. Arguably the best bit of crisis management in 2025 was the CEO of Oura Ring, whose speedy, lo-fi but sincere response to data security accusations – on Reddit – was a lesson in how to protect reputation in today’s world.
The counterintuitive truth is this: the best defence against deepfakes will not be more polish. It will be human imperfection. Leaders who show up regularly, across formats, with unvarnished language, minor mistakes and unmistakable humanity will be harder to fake and easier to trust.
Reputation will belong to those brave enough to look real.
3. Action will finally eclipse articulation
By 2026, audiences will be even less patient with beautifully articulated strategies that are not matched by visible action (this is a trend that gains momentum fast as millions of Generation Alphas – the largest generation in human history – reaches voting age in the UK at the next election).
This does not mean companies should stop communicating. It means communication must follow action, not lead it.
The brands that stand out will be those that narrow the gap between what they say and what people can see, touch, experience or verify. Those that accept that reputation is built downstream of behaviour.
Blurred will always argue that reputation is earned in the real world and merely reported on in the media. 2026 will make that belief unavoidable.
The conclusion
The future of corporate reputation is not more sophisticated messaging. It is more coherent behaviour.
It is fewer silos, fewer filters and fewer excuses. It is leaders stepping into the light imperfectly. It is companies accepting that trust cannot be generated by technology alone.
Reputation has always been human. We just spent a decade pretending it wasn’t.
In 2026, that pretence ends.
Image shows an AI-generated graphic of corporate and consumer audiences meeting, in Blurred colours