How Heathrow turned stakeholder sentiment into a single reputation metric

As Europe’s busiest airport, Heathrow has an incredibly diverse set of stakeholders, from MPs and the local community to international partners and the 78 million customers passing through each year.

The challenge: many audiences, one reputation

Mapping the attitudes of these groups is a constant challenge, and one Heathrow wanted to address to inform their communications strategy.

They also wanted to map their overall reputation as a single, actionable metric for use by the Executive Committee to track business strategy and value. This would allow them to plot their performance against other regulated brands.

The solution: connecting every stakeholder data source

1. Identify the stakeholders. Onclusive partnered with the client to identify the key stakeholder groups and agreed the best way to track their opinions.
2. Gather the sources. Sources included Heathrow’s existing data assets and publicly available information, such as passenger feedback on social media and MP and opinion leader comments in various channels.
3. Harmonize the data. We worked to connect and harmonize the datasets by agreeing the appropriate metrics from survey results and, using human analysis, applying sentiment scores to mainstream and social media outputs.
4. Report quarterly. The quarterly report we deliver plots the magnitude and sentiment of each group over time, as well as the key drivers behind any changes.

The results: a single measure of reputation

The quarterly report provides an invaluable insight to inform communications strategy, and all of it adds up to an overall metric score for Heathrow’s reputation.