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Reputation Management
The London School of Public Relations supports the idea that public relations can also be termed reputation management, although it recognises that PR has not yet fully evolved a complete reputation management function.
Although many different definitions of PR are available, rather ironically PR itself has suffered to a certain extent from both an identity and credibility crisis during the 1990s. The main reason for such difficulties in defining not just the nature of PR, but also its scope, is the ascendancy of reputation capital. Within brand management this has resulted in a shift form product to value focus, which in turn has placed greater demands on PR and its campaign outcomes.
Public relations is rather like a child that has rapidly outgrown its clothes; what fitted a few years ago now looks inappropriate and outmoded. Equally, the operating business environment for PR has also radically changed since the late 1980s, becoming more hostile, complex and interdependent. As a result, PR finds itself in a challenging, yet confusing position, being considered on the one hand a key communications and reputation discipline, but, on the other hand, little more than glorified media relations.
The rise of PR as a weapon in corporate armoury has been largely based on how, as a communication tool, PR delivers credibility through third party advocacy for corporations. Many international corporations and brands such as Starbucks, Red Bull, The Body Shop, eBay, and Amazon, to name just a few, owe a significant part of their communication success to PR strategies.
So what exactly is the relationship between PR and reputation management? Our view is that PR is developing slowly into a more strategic and holistic discipline termed reputation management. Such a view would have to recognise reputation management as an interdisciplinary subject that acts to present realistically and manage a corporation or its brands in the best way possible. Unlike traditional approaches to PR, the reputation management approach does not just seek to offer promises, but actively and strategically guides a brand in such a way that delivers on the promise. The logical outcome of such an argument is that brand and reputation are not the same – brands make promises, reputation is about the delivery on such promises.
Corporate Reputation
Corporate reputation is the sum of the values that stakeholders attribute to a company, based on their perception and interpretation of the image the company communicates and its behaviour over time.
John Dalton & Susan Croft: Managing Corporate Reputation- The Problems with Marketing: a post-modern crisis?
Since the early 1990s, marketing has been in a state of uncertainty and has come under considerable scrutiny and criticism. Traditional approaches to transactional marketing and the 4Ps framework have been considered inadequate and this has resulted in some degree of confusion and impotence in modern marketing education. To compound these difficulties, ethnographic and market research combined with psychographic segmentation research have revealed that your average “customer” does not really exist any more, especially in ethnically diverse populations. Although most people still accept the basic framework of the 4Ps approach (included extended versions such as 7Ps) will always be useful, it has as a model suffered by its over emphasis from a seller’s point of view.
The 4Ps: the marketing mix (McCarthy, 1960)
1. Product
2. Price
3. Place
4. Promotion
Additional Ps (Booms and Bitner, 1981)
1. People
2. Physical evidence
3. Process
This has resulted in academics, such as Lauterborn (1990) and Kotler et al (1991) producing the 4Cs model, thereby adopting a more customer-orientated perspective. The 1990s saw the emergence of integrated marketing communications (IMC) that was also part of a growing consensus to engage the customer and provide consistent messages across many different channels of communications.
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1.Product: |
CONSUMER |
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2.Price: |
COST |
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3.Place: |
CONVENIENCE |
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4.Promotion: |
COMMUNICATIONS |
This viewpoint was also supported in part by a number of relational approaches that emerged in the 1990s, including direct marketing, database marketing and customer relationship management (CRM), which tended to be technology driven. Their modern fusion has resulted in a marketing philosophy referred to as relationship marketing that places emphasis on building (and more importantly retaining) a one-one (profitable) relationship with consumers over the long term. During all these changes, PR’s role diversified and it began to adopt a more holistic and diffuse reputation role for product and corporate brands.
Brands and brand management should now be considered part of the PR armoury, especially for corporate brands. The hub of the reputation wheel is brand, as it is around this construct that most reputations are lost and made.
Furthermore, the value of PR within the communications mix has increased considerably since the 1980s. Today, corporations depend less on mass media advertising and have adopted a more credible PR approach based on third party endorsement and consumer education.
As a consequence of the above, is PR, like so many other academic disciplines, in some form of post-modern identity crisis? Given that the marketing environment has changed so radically over the last two decades and that technology has allowed considerable marketing convergence, it is not surprising that a topic as amorphous as PR finds itself with such an identity crisis. The problems are numerous; definitions cannot be agreed upon, those that are available are vague and a large degree of discord exists between theorists and practitioners. To compound these problems many of the supporting elements of PR, such as sponsorship and event marketing, have become decentred and fragmented disciplines in their own right.
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