Dear Colleague,

Enron and others have taught us that corporate ethics is serious business. For one thing, the actions of these companies have brought public trust of corporations to an all-time low. That’s a problem for marketers.

If you take ethics seriously, you might want to consider these five ways to help your company live up to the standards you want.

• Put it in writing. It is important to have corporate ethics standards and to have them in writing. The fact that a statement of general standards of ethics or a specific code of conduct is in writing will help make people take it seriously.
• Make it an everyday issue for the board and CEO. The board and senior management make the big decisions. For every decision, it’s critical that they ask whether the action honors the company’s ethical standards.
• Consider an ethics gadfly. Appoint an ethics officer or someone to act as a gadfly to ask the tough questions, play the role of the skeptic, the challenger and the questioning outsider.
• Make it part of the culture. You can usually tell a lot about a company’s values at any point of contact. That’s because every employee shapes the company in some way. Values start at the top, but they won’t work if they stop there. It’s important to make ethics part of the culture, top to bottom.
• Make it a key communications objective. It’s one thing to operate at high ethical standards. It’s another to communicate it. That’s the job not only of PR, but of all your communications, both internal and external. Communicate a public commitment to ethical behavior; you'll build trust, and you’ll be far more likely to sustain your commitment.

These are tough times for corporate reputation management. It didn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to stay this way if our companies take ethics seriously.