What Could Change In Just One Short Year?

Time seems to be accelerating as I get older, and the year since we began publishing American Banker Magazine last July has gone by particularly fast for me.

It's no wonder. As the editor of a monthly publication, I tend to look at the entire year in just 12 increments. That's just 12 magazine covers to envision, 12 columns to write, 12 chances to set an editorial agenda that reflects (and, at our best, helps to steer) the big conversations taking place across the banking industry, et voilà-another year down. It's all very different from how I looked at the world at the start of my career. I grew up in the wire service industry, where developments unfolded over the course of mere minutes, and where updating stories with great frequency-adding a paragraph or two every time a new detail emerged-made it feel as though a lot of action could be packed into just one day of reporting. On that basis of measurement, a year looks like forever.

With more of the world having caught onto the idea of delivering and consuming news in real time, my leap into the magazine business last summer felt pretty countercultural. But while a year now seems like a smaller amount of time to me, I still can appreciate what a difference 12 short months can make. For example, this time last year, "occupy" was something you did to an airplane lavatory, not Wall Street. Rick Perry was nipping at the heels of Mitt Romney in the race for the Republican nomination for president. And the pronounced fringe of bangs you see in the photo above had no idea it was about to begin an epic grow-out phase.

One year on, "occupy" is practically synonymous with "protest," the governor of Texas is back home trying to come up with the third reason his campaign flamed out, and after several months of experimenting with all kinds of ways to keep my hair out of my eyes, the bangs are back to their year-ago length thanks to a regrettable moment of grow-out fatigue that coincided with a recent trip to the hairdresser. (What hasn't changed in a year? My blushing at the idea of having my photo here.)

But plenty else can happen inside the span of 12 months. Updates to the Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, can go from pending to officially taking effect-and then quickly become the basis for lawsuits against banks whose ATMs are not yet compliant with the new standards (see the front page of our Briefings section for more on that).

Also, consumer perceptions of bank brands can change in a year's time. And how. Last July, we shared the results of our second annual survey of bank reputations in a piece entitled "Banks Get Just a Little More Love." Reputation scores for 30 large banks in our survey, conducted with Reputation Institute, looked to be on the mend from our baseline study in 2010. But since then, the public has been stirred up all over again by new fees (or the threat thereof), by the messages they're absorbing from Occupy Wall Street, by the heightened rhetoric of election-year politics and by the jobs data still providing monthly reminders of our economic woes.

In this month's cover story, we break down the results of our 2012 reputation survey, in which all banks seemingly got tarred with the same brush. We'd argue the most important takeaway is not the ranking-the scores for the 30 banks in the survey were relatively close, and none were very strong. More important is finding new ways to approach reputation management, and learning to roll with the punches to brand perceptions.