Most organisations think about their brand in terms of what they say and what they publish. What this conversation makes clear is that brand reputation is also formed by what is absent, what is inconsistent, and what exists in the digital environment without any deliberate management at all.
The gap between the reputation a brand believes it has and what actually exists online is one of the most significant – and most overlooked – strategic risks in modern business. Leaders and organisations routinely overestimate how well their intentions translate into the digital signals others receive.
This session brings together practitioners from marketing, executive search, events, and corporate leadership to explore that gap from multiple angles. The conversation covers brand evolution, the signals sent by inconsistent or thin digital presence, the role of leadership visibility in brand reputation, and what happens when organisations fail to connect their core values to their online behaviour.
The discussion is grounded in real examples – from the Allbirds brand pivot, to a hospitality company that turned a moment of vandalism into a brand story, to the concrete financial consequences of a botched product launch. The practical dimension is consistent throughout: what can leaders and organisations actually do to close the gap between how they intend to be seen and how they are actually interpreted?
Key Questions Explored
- What does a thin or inconsistent digital presence actually signal to potential clients, partners, and AI systems?
- How do brands lose control of their own narrative – and how do they get it back?
- What is the difference between being digitally present and being digitally intentional?
- How does leadership visibility – or the absence of it – shape brand reputation online?
- When a brand's digital presence no longer reflects its values, what are the consequences and how are they recovered?
- What role does word of mouth still play in an environment dominated by digital signals and AI inference?
Who This Conversation Is For
This session will be of particular value to:
- Leaders and executives who want to understand how their personal and organisational brand is being interpreted digitally
- Marketing and communications professionals responsible for maintaining brand consistency across platforms
- Organisations navigating brand evolution, mergers, or significant strategic pivots
- Business owners and consultants building a presence and reputation in competitive digital environments
- Anyone responsible for talent attraction who wants to understand how employer brand signals are
read by candidates and AI systems
Key Insights From This Session
Absence is itself a signal
A brand that has little or no digital presence does not simply go unnoticed – it sends a signal of its own. Potential clients, partners, and AI systems interpret the absence as a data point, and rarely a reassuring one.
Presence without purpose undermines trust
Creating a LinkedIn® company page, a Facebook presence, or a website without a clear purpose for what it does and for whom is worse than not having one. Abandoned or purposeless digital assets create confusion and erode credibility.
Brand reputation lives in people, not platforms
Search terms may live in AI, but brand reputation lives in human experience. Every layer of automation and delegation between a leader and their audience is a filter that distorts the signal. The closer a brand stays to direct human connection, the stronger the reputation it builds.
Unexpected moments are brand-defining opportunities
How a brand responds to an unplanned or difficult moment tells people far more about its values than any planned campaign. The Convene example demonstrates that leaning into an unexpected situation with humour and authenticity can generate more trust and awareness than years of conventional marketing.
Core values must be the connective tissue
Whatever a brand publishes, shares, or engages with online needs to connect back to its core values – and that connection needs to be made explicit. Content that cannot be clearly tied to what the brand stands for creates confusion rather than recognition.
Digital presence is now a talent strategy issue
How an organisation shows up online is no longer just a marketing concern. It shapes whether top talent chooses to apply, whether executive candidates accept approaches, and how an organisation is assessed during due diligence. Employer brand and public brand are the same thing, read by the same systems.
Key Concepts From This Discussion
Brand interpretation gap
The distance between the reputation a brand believes it has and the one that exists in the digital environment. This gap is rarely visible to the brand itself and is consistently wider than leaders expect. It is formed by the aggregate of signals – published content, engagement behaviour, leadership visibility, and absence – that others read and infer from.
Signal versus noise in digital presence
Every element of a brand's digital behaviour generates a signal – a piece of information that others use to form an inference. Publishing a post is a signal. Not publishing when others expect engagement is also a signal. The challenge is not simply to produce more content but to ensure that the signals being generated are coherent, consistent, and aligned with the brand's intended reputation.
Intentional digital presence
A digital presence is intentional when it has been designed with a clear purpose, for a defined audience, on platforms that are genuinely relevant to that audience. It stands in contrast to the common pattern of presence-by-default, where organisations create profiles and pages because they feel they should, without defining what those assets are supposed to do.
Employment branding
The dimension of brand reputation that specifically shapes how an organisation is perceived by current and prospective employees. Employment branding sits at the intersection of internal culture and external communication, and it is increasingly assessed through the same digital channels – LinkedIn® profiles, company pages, and engagement patterns – that customers and partners use to evaluate a brand.
Return on engagement
A measure of brand value that prioritises the quality and authenticity of community engagement over raw metrics such as follower counts or click-through rates. A brand that generates genuine participation, trust, and relationship – even at modest scale – often outperforms one that has larger reach but shallower connection.
About the Speakers
Lynnaire Johnston
Lynnaire Johnston is an executive visibility strategist and founder of Link·Ability, based in New Zealand. She helps senior leaders ensure their presence – online and offline – reflects their level of expertise, authority, and influence. Her work focuses on AI discoverability, semantic visibility, and the gap between how leaders are interpreted and how they intend to be understood. She stepped into the hosting role for this session while regular host Roy Kowarski recovered from an operation.
Melanie Richards
Melanie Richards is a hybrid event conversion strategist certified in trust. She works with leaders and organisations to create conversations, collaborations, and modern workforces across in-person, virtual, and hybrid contexts. Her expertise in group dynamics and the unspoken dimensions of community makes her a distinctive voice in discussions about how brand reputation is built through authentic engagement.
Tracy Borenson
Tracy Borenson is an authentic marketing advisor based in Calgary, Canada. Her practice is built around the principle that sustainable marketing comes from genuine alignment between who you are and how you show up – not from following industry prescriptions. She works with individuals and teams to build marketing approaches that generate energy rather than drain it.
Felipe Cofiño
Felipe Cofiño works in executive search, hiring, and recruitment. He brings an external assessor's perspective to questions of brand reputation, consistency, and how organisations are perceived by candidates and the broader market. His work on employment branding sits at the intersection of talent strategy and organisational identity.
Ilia Francis
Ilia Francis brings experience from inside large organisations, offering a practitioner's perspective on how brand identity is managed – and sometimes mismanaged – at scale. Her contribution to this session focuses on how organisations can respond to unexpected moments, the cost of launch failures, and what genuine brand resilience looks like in practice.
Knowledge Block – Digital Presence and Brand Reputation
Brand reputation has always been shaped by what others say and think about an organisation. What has changed is where those judgements are formed and how persistent they are.
A decade ago, brand reputation was largely shaped through direct experience, word of mouth, and media coverage. Today, it is also shaped by what LinkedIn® signals, what search results surface, and what AI systems infer from the aggregate of a brand's digital behaviour. These systems do not wait for a briefing. They read what is there – and what is not there – and form views accordingly.
The consequence is that every organisation now has two versions of its brand: the one it intends, and the one that exists in the digital environment. For many organisations, those two versions do not match. The gap between them is formed by inconsistent messaging, inactive profiles, leaders who are invisible online, and content that exists without a clear connection to values or purpose.
Closing that gap requires more than producing more content. It requires intentionality – about which platforms are used and why, about what leadership visibility looks like and who is responsible for it, about how core values are reflected in every digital touchpoint. The organisations that manage this deliberately will have a significant and growing advantage over those that treat digital presence as a secondary concern.
Key Takeaways for Leaders
- Audit your digital presence from the outside in – not from the inside out. Ask what a potential client, candidate, or AI system would infer from what currently exists, not what you intended it to communicate.
- Every platform you create and abandon sends a signal. If you are not going to maintain a presence purposefully, do not create it.
- Connect every piece of content explicitly to your core values. Do not assume the connection is obvious – make it visible.
- Leadership visibility is a brand asset. When senior leaders are invisible online, the organisation's brand pays the price in credibility, talent attraction, and AI discoverability.
- Unexpected moments are opportunities. How you respond to something unplanned or difficult tells people far more about your brand than any campaign you design.
- Do your research before you commit. Whether it is a logo, a tagline, or a platform strategy – know what you are stepping into and what it signals before you publish.
Full Transcript
Below is the full conversation from the Disruptive Business Leadership session titled Does Your Digital Presence Support or Undermine Your Brand Reputation?
The transcript has been lightly edited for readability while preserving the meaning of the discussion. You can also watch the replay above.
Lynnaire Johnston
Kia ora and welcome everyone to today's Disruptive Business Leadership. I'm Lynnaire Johnston, stepping into the hot seat for our regular host Roy Kowalski, who is taking a couple of weeks off to recover from an operation. Roy tells me he's up and about and back on his feet, so no doubt he's listening. Good morning, Roy. I promise we will not misbehave today.
Lynnaire Johnston
I'm joined today by Mel Richards and Tracy Borenson, and we're expecting a couple more of our usual panellists shortly. Our wonderful Merrill has let me know that today is Juneteenth. We don't recognise that here in New Zealand, but I understand it is a significant occasion in the United States. When I looked it up this morning, I could quite see why – so Happy Juneteenth to all our friends in the US.
Lynnaire Johnston
Mel Richards, of course, you know very well. She is our trust champion and is based in New York. And joining us for the first time, thanks again to Merrill, is Tracy Borenson from Calgary – a marketing and branding specialist who is here to help us explore today's topic: does your digital presence support or undermine your brand reputation? If you have comments or questions, please put them in the chat and we'll bring them into the conversation as we go.
Lynnaire Johnston
A quick shout-out to Merrill – I understand that for the very first time, you were on a Clubhouse stage yesterday. I'm sorry we didn't know about it in advance, but we believe it to be true and we hope it went brilliantly. Good morning to Felipe, joining us from Washington. And now, since Tracy is new to the show, I'd like to give her the floor to introduce herself.
Tracy Borenson
Thank you, Lynnaire. I'm very excited to be here with this group. I identify as an authentic marketing advisor, and authenticity is really my focus. To me, authenticity means doing or saying what you would do or say – in alignment with who you are, not what someone else thinks you should do. It has nothing to do with meeting external expectations. It's about being in genuine alignment with yourself.
Tracy Borenson
Marketing is my area of practice, and there are a lot of 'shoulds' that float around the marketing industry. My goal is to move those aside and help people figure out what they would actually do – because when you do that, it can be fun, it can be productive, and it can drive energy rather than drain it. I'm also a mum, I'm Canadian, I live near the Rocky Mountains, and I only drink tea. Those are the important things to know about Tracy Borenson.
Lynnaire Johnston
We're fans of tea on this show, so you're among friends. Thank you for joining us at relatively short notice, Tracy – and thank you again to Merrill for the recommendation. So let me just set out what I'd like to explore today. I want to look at the gap between the brand reputation an organisation or leader believes they have and what actually exists in the digital environment. I want to examine what signals LinkedIn® and search systems are reading, and what they're inferring from those. And I want to help leaders and organisations understand that digital presence is not passive – it is constantly being interpreted.
Lynnaire Johnston
I'd like to start with a short story about a brand that has been dear to my heart for about twenty years. I'm not a slavish follower of fashion, and I'm not particularly a shoe person – except that I love Allbirds. Allbirds started as a New Zealand brand making shoes from Merino wool. They launched in beautiful colours and became genuinely beloved. As they grew and moved into Asian markets, the colour range contracted, and some of what made Allbirds distinctive began to fade. What remained was comfort and durability. Over time the brand diluted, and this year it has been sold and is now transitioning into an AI company. I've just bought what may be my final pair, and I have no idea what I'll wear when they're done.
Lynnaire Johnston
My question to start us off: do you have a story about a brand you really loved that then changed out of all recognition – and you thought, that's not what I signed up for? Tracy, would you like to go first?
Tracy Borenson
There's a really interesting parallel between how humans evolve and how companies evolve. Humans are always changing – we encounter new ideas, new experiences, and that shifts our perspective. Which means buying habits are always in flux. Companies selling to those evolving consumer preferences face the same constant motion. Nothing stays still.
Tracy Borenson
I think of musicians as brands, actually. When I was a teenager, the Backstreet Boys were my go-to. I went to one of their concerts a few years ago with friends, and we were all pretending we were fifteen again. Their new music had evolved – as they have evolved as humans and musicians – but the audience wanted the old catalogue. The music had moved on, but the audience hadn't moved with it. So evolution is what's coming up for me here. It's not something you can stop. The question is whether you're paying attention to how that evolution lands with the people who've chosen you.
Melanie Richards
What's catching me as we talk about this is how our voices are changing – when we show up, why we show up, and where we show up. Some brands, particularly right now during Pride Month, are not mentioning the things that genuinely matter to their loyal consumers, their employees, their stakeholders. That gap between what a brand stands for and what it says – or doesn't say – is really part of the support or undermine question. I'm a Crocs person now, which I say with complete conviction – a dear friend introduced me on holiday when I'd forgotten to pack sandals. The point is that Lynnaire's connection to Allbirds is a trusted relationship built over years. What's happened to that brand is more than a rename or a refocus. It's a fundamental shift, and we need to be conscious of the change in voice and the impact that has on the people who've invested their trust.
Felipe Cofiño
I want to look at this from a slightly different angle. I worked in corporate for many years, and mergers and acquisitions were a significant challenge to brand identity. The biggest mistake I saw repeatedly was when one brand tried to completely absorb the other. What I saw succeed was when people brought brands under an umbrella while preserving what made each of them valuable. If a brand has a strong reputation and loyal followers, you don't need to change what it looks like. I had a bank that merged, and the whole reason I chose them was their customer service. When the merger happened, the model changed, the service changed, the feel changed – and I changed banks. The value was already there. People just didn't see it.
Felipe Cofiño
There's also something I care deeply about, which is employment branding. How important is that brand when people are looking for jobs? It came up for me during annual audits with accounting, when I saw how significantly reputation risk featured as a business concern. Brand isn't just marketing – it's how people talk about you when you're not in the room. HBO went through so many iterations: HBO Max, HBO Now, just HBO, back to HBO. Pick a brand and commit to it.
Lynnaire Johnston
Some great stories to get us started. Let's move across to talking about what happens when brands don't have much of a digital presence, and we're left to interpret them from limited signals. If you don't have much of a digital signal, that absence is itself a signal. Brands without a meaningful online footprint are affected by visibility – not being seen by AI, not being discovered – and being overshadowed by those with a much stronger presence. Tracy, would you kick us off on this one?
Tracy Borenson
The key question is whether your digital brand is intentionally matched to what you're trying to achieve from a reputation standpoint. There are genuinely successful brands that are not on social media because they operate entirely in their community, through foot traffic. A beloved local ice cream place with queues out the door doesn't necessarily need a digital presence. So I wouldn't say digital presence is absolutely mandatory for every business. But if you're using a digital channel for sales, the answer changes entirely.
Tracy Borenson
Years ago I worked in furniture retail when Facebook was new for business. The instruction came down: we need a Facebook page. I asked what it was supposed to do for customers. The answer was: we just need one. So we created a page with no purpose, which customers started using for complaints that no one was monitoring. Having a presence without a purpose doesn't help anyone – it's like going to a networking event and hiding in the corner. Is that the presence you want? The point is intentionality. What I would do in person, what my brand actually is in person – how does that match what exists digitally? Because if it doesn't match, it's more likely to undermine the brand experience than do anything positive for it.
Melanie Richards
I've been spending a lot of time on Meta recently and this week I kept noticing advertisements for New York Knicks merchandise from accounts that had never previously advertised apparel, claiming discounts of 70% off. Anyone who's bought sports memorabilia knows that 70% off during a championship run doesn't add up. The moment I clicked on the first one, I was bombarded with similar ads. This is the undermining side of the equation. These digital presences create attention but have no trust behind them. Consistency and integrity matter. Turning up as an authentic version of yourself is where brands need to start.
Felipe Cofiño
Digital presence doesn't always mean being on camera or producing content. Merrill is a great example of this. He has built a genuinely distinctive digital presence – without posting, without being on camera – purely through engagement, community, support, and commenting. People need to realise that showing up digitally can take many forms. The right platform matters enormously too. I'm about to release a second children's book. LinkedIn has been generous, but if I want to reach the people who would actually buy a children's book, I need to be on Instagram. Companies need to ask the same question: am I present in the space where my audience actually is?
Felipe Cofiño
Some of the most respected brands built their reputation entirely through word of mouth before ever touching paid advertising. Hyatt and Starbucks both operated that way in their early years. Word of mouth still has a very strong place. But once you choose a platform, use it purposefully. Not choosing the right platform and using it properly can hurt you far more than help you.
Ilia Francis
Hello everyone, joining from Toronto. It's a pleasure and an honour to be here, Tracy. I have a story that I think Melanie will appreciate, given the Knicks conversation. The brand is Convene – an award-winning hospitality company. During the Knicks parade in New York, fans were celebrating in the streets. Someone jumped up at the Convene building and pulled the N from the middle of their signage.
Ilia Francis
What did Convene do? They changed their Instagram logo to show an N that is just falling away. They embraced it entirely. Instead of treating it as vandalism or a reputation risk, they leaned in and made it part of their brand identity in that moment. They shared the videos of fans tearing at the logo. The message was: we're celebrating with you. What does that translate to? Trust. Relatability. An invitation to engage. Before that moment, Convene was completely unknown to me. Now I know exactly who they are, and I associate them with joy and community spirit.
Lynnaire Johnston
That's a wonderful story, Ilia – thank you. And it leads us very naturally into the gap between brand intention and brand interpretation. What I often see is a significant gap between the reputation a brand believes it has and what actually exists in the digital environment. Merrill is actually a good example here. His brand is that he sits in the corner – present but not overtly visible. And yet he has a significant impact on this community. When he stepped onto a Clubhouse stage yesterday, that reputation shifted. That also happens with organisations: there's often a disconnect between the reputation they think they have and what their customers or the broader market actually perceives. Tracy, would you open this one?
Tracy Borenson
This is genuinely complex. We're living in a time where digital tools, automation, and AI are putting more distance between businesses and their clients. Many organisations have moved to automated NPS surveys, and they no longer actually talk to their customers. Brand reputation lives in people – not in AI. Search terms might live in AI, but the actual reputation lives in human experience. Every layer between your desired brand reputation and the actual experience of the people you serve is a filter, and signal gets lost through every filter.
Tracy Borenson
When you look at larger organisations, leaders who are building brand reputation in the market often have no interest in having a digital presence. So the marketing team carries that responsibility instead – and the result is a genuine disconnect. A leader I work with recently attended an event and sent a photo back to the social media team with a note saying do a post about this. The social media manager had to spend hours trying to figure out how to incorporate a photo with no context, no story, no background. What ends up on the company page is a generic post that nobody remembers and most people scroll straight past.
Tracy Borenson
I've never been able to make a leader post if they don't want to. You simply can't. And pretending those challenges don't exist doesn't help anyone close the gap. What does help is having honest conversations, developing processes that account for those constraints, and accepting that the gap may never fully close – but the effort to minimise it is what matters.
Melanie Richards
Building on Ilia's Convene story – I'm actually looking for a new event space, so now I know about them. I think we have genuine opportunities to bring people together from a legacy perspective, and we often miss them because we're trying to do too much. Ilia's story resonated because instead of conflict, Convene created an invitation to engage. What I call return on energy and engagement – instead of friction, there's texture, there's relatability, there's warmth. That's something organisations of every size can learn from.
Felipe Cofiño
A brand always ties back to core values. If what you're doing connects to your core values, it makes sense and people can follow the logic. The digital brand can bite you if you're not paying attention to what's happening. Companies get attacked for not supporting the environment, for not being employee-friendly, for a single customer service moment that goes viral. The key is to get ahead of it. What Convene did was brilliant not just tactically but because it demonstrated community support. That simple story sends a huge message of belonging. Someone told me early on: whatever you post about, tie it back to your core values. I posted about my wedding vow renewal on LinkedIn. People were surprised, but I tied it back to building long-lasting relationships – which is exactly what I talk about professionally. The connection was clear. Make the link explicit. Otherwise your audience doesn't know what to do with it.
Lynnaire Johnston
Thank you, Felipe. And I'll mention that Roy has actually been in the comments today from his recovery. If that isn't a brand living up to its name, I don't know what is. Well done, Roy – and please take great care of yourself. My business is small and nobody's ever heard of me. I'm not a Coca-Cola. And so people have to be able to recognise my logo because if my company page appears next to a comment on LinkedIn, that little logo needs to mean something. Brand consistency at every touchpoint is important, however modest the scale.
Ilia Francis
I brought you a positive story in the first round, so now let me offer the cautionary side. A brand I genuinely like is Gymshark – a UK-based global fitness apparel brand. They created significant buzz ahead of a popular clothing launch, built real excitement, got people ready to buy. On the day of the launch, the website crashed entirely. There were apparently bots attempting to access the site, which meant no sales, no product, nothing. The estimated cost was around £140,000 to £150,000 in lost revenue – in approximately twelve hours. Customers who had been excited and ready were left enraged.
Ilia Francis
They've had other incidents too – campaign launch failures, and a situation involving an influencer connection to a conflict that led to legal action when they attempted to cut ties. The accumulation of negative moments leaves a mark. I still like the brand, and I've never personally had a bad experience. But the reputation around their launch days now includes doubt. If customers don't trust that a launch will work, they wait, or they don't bother. One incident handled poorly can become the thing people remember.
Lynnaire Johnston
That's an ideal place to pause on that thread. I want to tie it back to where we started, with Allbirds. They are, in a sense, a victim of their own success. They started as a New Zealand brand – New Zealand made, New Zealand designed – and became so successful globally that the business has now pivoted entirely into AI. I've been a loyal customer for decades. As far as I'm concerned, the brand reputation I built with them over all those years is being dismantled. I'm sure there are sound economic reasons, but the reputational consequence for the customers who loved them is significant.
Lynnaire Johnston
We're on the hour, and as Felipe rightly said, this could run for another four hours. What I'd like to suggest is that we come back next week to discuss how brands are interpreted on LinkedIn® and by AI – with or without you. That feels like a very natural next chapter. Before we wrap up, I'd like a very brief tip from each panellist. Mel, will you start us off?
Melanie Richards
Be concise, be candid, and communicate with clarity. Pay attention to awareness, perception, reality, and vision – rather than focusing only on outcomes. And as Ilia showed with Convene: when you handle an unexpected moment with authenticity and warmth, you create something people remember and want to be part of.
Felipe Cofiño
Do your research. Whether you're about to post something, write something, or design a logo – do your research. You're protecting not just the brand, you're protecting the whole organisation and its reputation. I'll share a personal example: for about a year, my logo was two Cs for Cofiño Consulting. I didn't know until someone pointed out that it was the Chanel logo. Do your research before you commit to anything.
Ilia Francis
You can take advantage of unexpected situations to build trust and deepen your connection with your audience. But when things don't go according to plan, stick to your values and stay true to your identity. Be thoughtful, because everything stays online permanently. Plan ahead. Don't get drawn into a reactive moment that could do lasting damage. One incident can undermine years of trust.
Lynnaire Johnston
Wonderful. Thank you so much to Melanie, Felipe, and Ilia for joining us today. And of course, our very best wishes to Roy for a speedy recovery – he's clearly not entirely off duty, given he's been in the comments throughout. I'll be back in the hot seat next week, and we'll be exploring how brands are interpreted on LinkedIn® and by AI. Thank you also to Tracy Borenson, who joined us from Calgary at short notice and made a genuinely excellent contribution. And as always, thank you to Merrill for making sure everything ran smoothly. We'll see you all back here next week.