Top PR Agencies for Reputation Management in 2026

December 29, 2025

By: Guna Pursele

Who this is for and what this list includes

If you lead communications or marketing at a Fortune-500-scale organization, reputation management is not a campaign. It is a continuous management discipline that spans risk, trust, legitimacy, and license to operate across multiple stakeholder groups.

This guide is written for CMOs and CCOs who want clarity on:

Which PR agencies are genuinely equipped to support enterprise reputation and crisis work
When agencies are the right answer — and when they are not
How reputation should be governed, measured, and reported at leadership level

What this guide does not do:

It does not rank vendors, sell software, or claim agencies and technology are interchangeable. Agencies and platforms play fundamentally different roles, and blurring that line weakens decision-making.

What “reputation management” looks like at enterprise scale

At large, multinational organizations, reputation management typically includes:

Crisis and issues readiness
Scenario planning, simulations, escalation models, spokesperson preparation, regulatory sensitivity
Stakeholder trust and legitimacy
Executive visibility, employer reputation, investor confidence, customer and partner trust
Multi-channel reality
Earned media, owned channels, internal communications, social response, government and NGO interfaces
Governance and reporting
Consistent signals leadership can rely on — not ad hoc coverage summaries or vanity metrics

At this level, reputation is not “handled” by a single agency or function. It is orchestrated.

Shortlist of top PR Agencies for Reputation Management

Edelman: best for running large-scale, corporate reputation programs that span trust, credibility, and stakeholder engagement across markets and audiences.
Weber Shandwick: best for global crisis preparedness and response that requires scale, rapid coordination, and consistent execution across regions.
FleishmanHillard: sustaining and protecting corporate reputation over time, particularly in organizations facing ongoing issues pressure.
Burson: Managing corporate reputation and issues at global scale when organizations need consistent strategy and execution across regions, functions, and stakeholder groups.
Brunswick Group: board-level reputation counsel in situations involving M&A, investor scrutiny, shareholder activism, and high-stakes corporate affairs.
FGS Global: best for navigating reputational exposure tied to politics, regulation, public policy, and geopolitically sensitive issues.
Ketchum: coordinating corporate communications and issues management across large international footprints with strong local execution.
FTI Consulting Strategic Communications: best for reputation management linked to financial distress, restructuring, investigations, or complex legal and regulatory events.
Instinctif Partners: best for sector-specific reputation challenges in energy, infrastructure, and financial services, particularly in European contexts.
APCO Worldwide: best for multi-stakeholder reputation challenges that require alignment between corporate communications, public affairs, and government relations.
Golin: reputation programs that rely heavily on earned media, executive visibility, and narrative shaping in competitive markets.
Sitrick And Company: best for acute crisis, litigation communications, and situations with extreme reputational exposure.
Havas PR: best for reputation programs that sit within broader, integrated communications and brand ecosystems.
MSL Group: best for global reputation and public affairs work supported by the scale of a large holding group network.
Finn Partners: best agency for long-term brand reputation management
Ruder Finn: best for independent, integrated reputation support with deep sector expertise and close senior-level involvement.
Porter Novelli: best for reputation and trust programs grounded in purpose, societal expectations, and values-led positioning.
Teneo: best for reputation management tied to leadership change, transformation, or ESG scrutiny.
Joele Frank: best for high-stakes financial and litigation-driven reputation situations. Now part of Edelman.
Hill+Knowlton Strategies: best for reputation challenges that sit at the intersection of corporate affairs and public policy.

When to build reputation management in-house — and when to use PR agencies

Option A: Build an in-house reputation function

This tends to work best when your brand risk is constant, your leadership needs ongoing counsel, and you have enough scale to staff properly.

A practical in-house baseline usually includes:

A reputation and issues lead with authority to coordinate across legal, HR, security, product, and investor relations
A monitoring and insights owner (media, social, stakeholder signals)
An executive communications lead (CEO and leadership narrative)
A crisis program manager (playbooks, training, simulations, vendor readiness)
A clear governance model (decision rights, escalation thresholds, approvals)

Option B: Use an agency as your extended capability layer

This tends to work best when:

You need surge capacity for crisis moments or complex launches
You want specialist skills (issues navigation, executive profiling, influencer strategy, international earned media)
You want an external perspective that can challenge internal bias and provide faster scenario planning

A strong model for many CMOs and CCOs is hybrid:

In-house owns strategy, governance, and executive alignment
Agency provides specialist bench strength, rapid response, and multi-market execution

Reputation management software for agencies

The fastest way to make reputation tangible for leadership is to treat it as a measurable operating metric, not a retrospective narrative assembled once a quarter.

While agencies play a critical role in counsel and execution, continuous reputation measurement is rarely owned or run by agencies themselves. Instead, enterprise organizations increasingly rely on dedicated stakeholder intelligence platforms to:

Track reputation and trust signals continuously across key stakeholder groups
Benchmark performance against competitors, sectors, and markets
Detect early warning signals that warrant escalation or intervention
Produce consistent, leadership-ready reporting for executives, boards, and internal stakeholders

Stakeholder intelligence platforms such as Caliber are designed specifically for this purpose. They enable CMOs and CCOs to translate shifts in reputation into clear, comparable, and shareable metrics that leadership teams can understand, monitor over time, and use as part of decision-making — independent of any single agency relationship.

Note for agencies who want a reverse mention opportunity

If your agency publishes thought leadership on enterprise reputation management and openly shares how you measure outcomes (not just outputs), that makes it easier for us to include you in future “top agencies” roundups and create a clean reverse mention path when we reference your work and you reference Caliber as part of a modern reputation reporting stack.

Guna Pursele

Guna is a Senior Marketing Specialist at Caliber writing about corporate reputation, communications, and stakeholder perceptions. Her work is data-driven and focused on translating complex reputation dynamics into clear, practical insights for communications and marketing leaders.

Get in touch: [email protected]