Week 9

Reputation Management

Discuss the relevance of reputation management for organisations

Reputation as a separate entity to public relations or not has often been argued upon by practitioners and academics. The former insists that public relations is concerned with maintaining the reputation of organisation while the latter thinks that reputation is but one of the many factors public relations practitioners has to handle.

British chartered institute of Public Relations (CIPR) says that public relations has the responsibility to uphold an organisations’ reputation while scholars like Fombrun thinks that maintaining relationships has precedence over maintaining reputation (Fombrun & Van Riel 2004).

Understand the role of corporate public relations in contemporary organisations

The role of corporate public relations is to make communities trust the organisation. Communities see corporations for example, as un-trustworthy and money-laundering businesses while at the same time want these very corporations to do public service. It is up to corporate PR to change the perception of these communities to be in their favour.

Explain the importance of stakeholders to the formation of corporate reputation

While there is no one definition for stakeholder, it is basically those who contribute to the organisations’ survival and those whose needs the management should be receptive to.

Clarkson, M. (1995) says that stakeholders might come in the form of:

Shareholders,

Employees

Customers

Suppliers

Governments

Communities

Distinguish between key concepts such as corporate reputation, image, brand, identity and culture

Corporate reputation is defined as ‘a collective assessment of a company’s ability to provide valued outcomes to a representative group of stakeholders’ (Fombrun, Gardberg & Sever 2000, 243). This reputation encompasses primarily that of people, issues and secondary only to the environment. According to Porritt (2005) there are two types of corporate reputation that respondents distinguish; relationship reputation and bottom line reputation. Relationship reputation refers to treatment of publics while bottom line reputation revolves around meeting investors’ and financial markets expectations.

Corporate Image

This is better known as short term reputation or perceptions that hold over a short period of time. Corporate image is the desired outlook that the corporation want the publics to seem them in. This is related largely to symbolic or visual means. Nonetheless it is still the action of the public relations practitioners undertake that make or break their relationships with the public.

Corporate brand and identity

Corporate identity is intertwined with corporate personality. Corporate personality is the organisational identity while corporate identity is concerned with the projection or expression of organisational identity. Corporate identity is not just restricted to visual projection but actually has 3 core elements; communication, behaviour and symbolism.

Communication is what the corporation project themselves as saying to the publics.

Behaviour shows what the corporation really is through its actions.

Symbolism is the visual means by which the corporations identify themselves and make the environment identify them through.

A corporate brand is what the organisation promises its stakeholders which include the very consumers which the product brand is primarily concerned with. Balmer (2003) said that the corporate brand represents the characteristics of corporate identity that the corporation wishes to make known officially, it holds strongly to its promise to its stakeholders and also to its individuality which gives way to increase trust among stakeholder by which they can maintain their corporate reputation.

Explore how proactive issues management can avert a crisis for an organisation

Issues management is a management function that seeks to identify potential threats to the organisation or key publics. It helps PR practitioners understand the issue in relations to the environment and hence prevent it from escalating into a crisis.

Understand the difference between a crisis and an issue

A crisis occurs when an issue that has not been addressed culminates into something serious such that it might affect the survivability of the organisation. An issue on the other hand arises when there is a difference between what the key publics expect of the organisation and what the organisation really do. An issue might be of a positive or negative nature. Issues include raising public awareness for the organisation’s message like environmental concern or the use of child labour.

Understand the role of public relations practitioners during crisis situations

William Benoit (1997) noted that during a crisis, ‘perceptions are more important than reality’. It is up to the PR practitioners to change the perception of the publics in order to protect its corporate reputation.

Identify the types of crises organisations can experience

Thierry Paunchant and Ian Mitroff (1992) explain that there are 2 dimensions to the 5 types of crises, those that arise from human or social actions and those that are technical or economic in nature. The five types of crisis are external economic attacks, external information attacks, megadamage , breaks and psychological.

This table is adopted from Pauchant & Mitroff (1992) model of crisis clusters.

Arises from Technical/Economic Actions

• Arises from economic /technical actions

External Economic Attacks	External Information Attack	Megadamage	Breaks
extortion bribery boycotts hostile takeovers	Copyright infringement Loss of information Counterfeiting Rumours	Environment Accidents	Recalls Product Defects Plant Defects Computer Breakdowns Poor operation/errors Poor security
Arises from Human/Social Actions
Psychological
Terrorism Copycats On-site sabotage/tampering Off-site sabotage/tampering Executive Kidnappings Sexual Harassment Rumours

Explore how each crisis follows a life cycle

Each crisis goes through 5 phases in their life cycle, prodromal, preparation, acute, chronic and lastly resolution (Fink 1986).

As there is a different theme in media coverage in each stage of life cycle, it will also require PR practitioners to give different sets of information at different stages. The life cycle also tells how the organisation respond to the crises and when and what level of disclosure is needed.

Phase 1 Prodomal

This is where any detection of events that could lead to issues. Issues management is crucial here as it prevent issues from escalating into crises. Media also go through the period of identifying potential issues and crisis and then prepare themselves to have coverage of a crisis. These trigger themes are scrutinised by both media and PR practitioners. It is important that PR set out response strategies when media shows any precursor to possible issues and before media makes any reports of a crisis.

Phase 2 Preparation

Organisations should implement strategies to control any message that media might put against them. The core to crisis management is to control the communication between media and the publics. PR practitioners cannot allow the media to take control of messages concerning the organisation and it has to implement immediate crisis strategies to do so. This is especially true during the period of the crisis.

Phase 3 Acute

This is the shortest yet the most crucial time period. Issues will evolve into crises here and causes fiscal, emotional and physical damage to the organisation. Mass media coverage will rave itself over the crisis. PR practitioner need to learn how to handle these extensive probes into the crisis and the organisation and appease its stakeholders.

Phase 4 Chronic

The after –effects of the crisis is that it will leave the organisation with multiple allegations ranging from criminal to civil charges and also with media constant reference to the crisis. PR practitioners need to show the organisations’ publics that it has learnt from the crisis and handle its messages so that media and the publics will be in their favor.