How top companies are unifying brand and reputation
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Figma's Nairi Hourdajian (left) and Axios' Eleanor Hawkins at Axios Communicators Live. Photo: Sam Popp for Axios
In 2026, brand and reputation will no longer sit in different lanes, communication chiefs from Estée Lauder, Figma and Anthropic said at a recent Axios Communicators event.
Why it matters: In the mind of the audience, reputation and brand are the same — with one building credibility and the other building loyalty.
State of play: Whether it's a B2B company trying to win over end users, a fast-growing startup seeking credibility, or a global corporation managing a portfolio of brands, the lines separating what you say, how you show up and what people believe about you have never been thinner.
- Companies that fail to connect their brand and reputation strategies risk confusing consumers, losing trust and ceding ground to competitors.
Zoom in: Anthropic has ramped up its comms efforts to clearly position it in the minds of users, talent, regulators and investors.
- Anthropic's chief communications officer Sasha de Marigny said its brand story starts with the company's structure and founding philosophy.
- "It's not so much that we're trying to differentiate ourselves. … We are different," she told an audience of more than 400 people at Axios Communicators Live. "The public benefit mission is what grounds everything Anthropic does."
- "The transformative potential of AI is not short-form video and treating it as a glorified search engine. It's to advance human intelligence and what we're capable of as a species," she added.
Zoom out: Estée Lauder also relies on its products and corporate mission to help connect with consumers, chief communications and public affairs officer Meridith Webster said.
- "People like our products … but they also want to be a part of something that actually means something at the end of the day," she said.
- "A corporate story is meant to drive a credibility message, and a brand story is meant to really drive connection. You can't have one without the other. They all need to live in harmony."
Between the lines: For companies that might traditionally be viewed as B2B, taking a more consumer-friendly tone and establishing hyper-engaged user communities are major assets.
- "Your buyers are humans too," Figma's chief communications officer Nairi Hourdajian said. "At Figma, my team knows I have trigger words — 'leverage,' 'enable,' 'empower.' ... There are much clearer ways to say what you mean. And so we really try to avoid jargon."
- "I do think it's really important to have that cohesion across both what I call our consumer patina and our B2B brand."
Plus, in-person events have become a major tenet of the brand-building strategy.
- Anthropic hosted Claude cafe pop-ups in New York City and London, Estée Lauder took over a street in New York's SoHo neighborhood for its fragrance brick-and-mortar launch, and Figma hosts Config each year, which gathers creators, designers and superusers.
What to watch: Brand storytelling now shapes corporate reputation and vice versa, and as such, many chief communications officers are taking over the brand portfolio.
- For example, de Marigny oversees communications and brand for the artificial intelligence company, while executives from IBM, Dropbox, Lattice and GM have also merged the functions.
What's next: AI is upending how consumers discover brands, and large language models could soon be the window to a company's reputation.
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