The composition of corporate value has undergone a seismic transformation over the past half century. In 1975, tangible assets—property, plant, equipment and inventory—represented 83% of the market value of S&P 500 companies.
Today, that relationship has completely inverted.
According to Ocean Tomo’s recently released Intangible Asset Market Value study, intangible assets—brand, trust, relationships and reputation—now constitute approximately 92% of S&P 500 market capitalisation. The Brand Finance Global Intangible Finance Tracker confirms the same structural reality globally: the value of intangible assets held by the world’s largest companies has now reached USD 80 trillion, a 28% increase year-on-year.
That reality has a direct and material impact on how publicly listed companies should be governed—in every market, under every regulatory framework. If the overwhelming majority of enterprise value is now intangible, and if corporate reputation sits at the forefront of that value, then the absence of dedicated reputation expertise at board level is not merely a gap. It is a failure in risk governance.
And yet a growing call for dedicated board-level ownership of an organisation’s reputation remains unheeded. Despite the overwhelming risk significance of reputation, publicly listed company boards worldwide continue to be disproportionately composed of directors with backgrounds in finance, law and operations.
Perhaps what’s most unsettling about that disparity is that the boardroom blind spot is well understood by directors themselves. PwC’s US-based 2025 Annual Corporate Directors Survey found that only 32% of executives believe their boards are equipped with the right mix of skills and expertise. Elsewhere, analysis of S&P 500 board composition shows that while technology and cybersecurity expertise has surged, communications and reputation management remain conspicuously absent from most skills disclosures.
In Europe, the picture is similar. The Euronext Corporate Governance Barometer 2025 notes that while gender diversity and board independence have improved markedly across the Stoxx Europe 600, the focus of board composition reform has tended to focus on demographic representation rather than strategic skills gaps. And in Asia-Pacific, board-level reputation expertise continues to be treated as a gap to be filled by external advisers during a crisis, rather than as permanent governance capability to be embedded before one arises.
The global pattern is consistent: boards are expanding their aperture to address specific issues and opportunities while leaving one of their most material risk areas ungoverned.
In an environment where institutional investors now scrutinise non-financial performance across every major exchange, reputation is no longer a soft consideration—it is a hard driver of capital allocation. Companies with strong reputations consistently command higher price-to-earnings ratios, reflecting investor confidence in their resilience and future growth.
The cost of failure is equally concrete. Reputation crises—from executive misdemeanours to environmental incidents—trigger immediate and sometimes irreversible financial consequences. Share price collapses, regulatory intervention, consumer boycotts and talent flight are the hallmarks of organisations that treated reputation as a communications problem rather than a strategic asset requiring board-level stewardship.
Set against today’s backdrop of geopolitical and geo-commercial instability, an inadequate structural framework that constrains a board’s effective governance of reputational risk is all the more questionable. The historical and well-established norms of managerial ownership of corporate reputation have fast become outdated.
Much of that is because reputational vulnerability is felt in real time across supply chains, investor sentiment, and public trust. Regulators, legislators, activists, governments and consumers across every major market are more focused on-board accountability than at any time since the global financial crisis. The scrutiny they apply is amplified by a media and social ecosystem with near-zero barriers to publishing a damaging point of view.
Further, the speed and depth of public scrutiny have escalated to a point where reputational threat can crystallise faster than any traditional governance process can respond. The issue is rarely a lack of data. Listed companies have access to more stakeholder insight, media monitoring and sentiment analysis than at any previous point. The challenge is the ability to prioritise that data, build strategic foresight and establish a robust decision-making framework—one that treats reputation not as a downstream communications problem but as an upstream governance priority.
Businesses remain challenged by silos between departments—limited awareness of the downstream consequences of decisions made in isolation. Behind every major reputation crisis, one can typically identify an antecedent governance failure: a board that lacked the framework, vocabulary or the right perspective to interrogate reputational risk before it became a reputational emergency.
The role of the board is to probe those silos and connect those consequences. That function cannot exclude or treat corporate reputation as peripheral.
The biggest enemy of reputation is complexity and confusion. Both erode decision-making capability rapidly and can deteriorate into reputational threat faster than any communications function can respond. The antidote is not better crisis communications. It is better governance—a board composition that integrates reputational thinking into strategy, risk and capital allocation from the outset, regardless of which exchange a company lists on.
Across every major market, listed companies are required to disclose their board skills and explain the rationale for their composition. As governance frameworks evolve the question every chair and nomination committee should now be asking is a simple one: if 92% of our market capitalisation is intangible, and if corporate reputation sits at the centre of that value, why is there no one at our board table who has spent their career understanding it?
