Public Relations As Relationship Management

A Relational Approach To the Study and Practice of Public Relations

Eyun-Jung Ki, Jeong-Nam Kim, John A. Ledingham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138853805
• eBook ISBN: 9781317516330
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The emergence of relationship management as a paradigm for public relations scholarship and practice necessitates an examination of precisely what public relations achieves -- its definition, function and value, and the benefits it generates. Promoting the view that public relations provides value to organizations, publics, and societies through relationships, Public Relations as Relationship Management takes a in-depth look at organization-public relationships and explores the strategies that can be employed to cultivate and maintain them.

Expanding on the work published in the first edition, this thoroughly up-to-date volume covers such specialized areas of public relations as non-profit organizations, shareholder relations, lobbying, employee relations, and risk management. It expands the reader's ability to understand, conceptualize, theorize, and measure public relations through the presentation of state-of-the-art research and examples of the use of the relationship paradigm. Developed for scholars, researchers, and advanced students in public relations, Public Relations as Relationship Management provides a contemporary perspective on the role of relationships in public relations, and encourages further research and study.

Section II
Expansion of Organization-Public Relationships

4
The Effect of Relationships on Reputation and Reputation on Relationships

A Cognitive, Behavioral Study

James E. Grunig & Chun-ju Flora Hung-Baesecke

In the first years of the twenty-first century, academic scholars and public relations practitioners seemed to be rushing in different directions to identify a concept that defines the value of public relations to an organization. Scholars have identified relationships as the critical value that public relations produces for an organization, whereas practicing professionals have embraced reputation as the critical concept showing the value of the communication function. Joining the search on the side of professionals are organizational sociologists and business scholars who believe that reputation management is a new concept that is only marginally related to public relations.

In this chapter, we explore the meaning of reputation and relationships in the professional and academic literature and compare those concepts with similar ones, such as brand, image, and impression. We define reputation differently from current definitions of the term and develop a new method for measuring it. We then report results of an empirical study showing that reputations largely are a byproduct of management behaviors and organization‒public relationships—thus providing evidence that relationships should be the primary focus of public relations.

The Search for the Value of Public Relations

Throughout the history of public relations, practitioners and scholars have attempted to identify and name a single concept that defines the value of public relations. Early in public relations history, publicity by itself sufficed as the answer—“there is no such thing as bad publicity.” When public relations people recognized that publicity had to have some effect on a public before it had value, they adopted one faddish term after another. First it was image, then identity and image together. Now the popular terms are reputation and brand. Among academic scholars of rhetoric, the concept of “impression” (as in impression management) is similar.

Overlapping Terms for the Same Concept

With the exception of identity, most of these terms describe essentially the same phenomenon: what publics think of an organization. Identity describes what an organization thinks of itself. Subtle differences can be found in the professional and academic literature among reputation, image, brand, and impressions; but all basically describe cognitions that publics hold about organizations. Jeffries-Fox Associates (2000a) conducted a content analysis of 1,149 articles in 94 trade and academic publications to compare the use of the terms reputation, brand equity, and good will and found that reputation and brand equity were the most frequently used terms. Jeffries-Fox Associates concluded that “the same component ideas are associated with brand equity and corporate reputation” and that the terms are “used interchangeably” (p. 6). At the same time, they concluded that public relations managers are more likely to use the term reputation and marketing managers to use brand equity. As a result, they recommended adopting the term reputation to distinguish public relations from marketing.

Reputation, image, brand, perception,¹ and impression are used interchangeably in the professional literature and the academic literature of business scholars—often to define one another. For example, Fombrun’s (1996) book, Reputation, is subtitled, Realizing Value from the Corporate Image. A headline in the January 28, 2002, issue of PR News read, “2002 Corporate Image Conference Offers Valuable Branding Lessons.” Hatch and Schultz (2000) defined image as “the impressions and perceptions of the organization formed and held by external stakeholders” (p. 20). In an editorial, PR Week (Staff, 2000, October 2) described a second study by Jeffries-Fox Associates (2000b) for the Council of Public Relations Firms that analyzed several systems offered by research firms to measure reputation. The editorial reported that:

of the seven tools identified in the study, three have the term “brand” in the title of their product; three use “reputation”; two talk about “perceptions”; and each includes the phrase “admiration” and “image” (p. 10).

Roper and Fill (2012) acknowledged that “as with the term branding, some authors struggle to define reputation precisely.” They then quoted Charles Fombrun, “a prominent writer on the topic of reputation,” as saying that reputation “comprises a quartet of elements (social image, financial image, product image, and recruitment image” (p. 5). Fombrun and Van Riel (2004) explained that “brand and reputation are not synonymous—and they differ in important ways” (p. 4):

On the one hand, a brand describes the set of associations that customers have with the company’s products. . . . Reputation, on the other hand, involves the assessments that multiple stakeholders make about the company’s ability to fulfill their expectations. . . . Brand, therefore, is a subset of reputation management (p. 4).

This confusing use of terms to identify essentially the same concept led Verčič (2000a) to lament in a presentation to the IABC International Conference in Vancouver: “For nearly a century, the public relations profession has been trying to disassociate itself from the image of being a profession about image-making. It is therefore a pity that it tries to redefine itself as reputation management—which is basically the same as image-making” (p. 4).

In spite of the fact that the term reputation means essentially the same thing as older, discredited concepts, the public relations profession has vigorously attempted to associate reputation management with public relations. The “next challenge,” according to the editorial in PR Week (Staff, 2000, October 2), “is to mobilize support for the phrase ‘corporate reputation’” first among “PR agencies and in-house practitioners” so that “there is a better chance that the second audience—clients and journalists—will understand and use the phrase themselves” (p. 10).

Not all professionals concur that reputation is the superior term, especially those who advocate an integrated marketing communication (IMC) approach to public relations. Gedulig (1999) acknowledged that reputation is:

a term public relations practitioners informally but enthusiastically adopted a few years ago to define their function and to distinguish themselves from their communications cousins. . . . Those people who see their job as “corporate reputation” (read PR) believe their role is managing relationships, which seems a lot like “good will” dressed up in 90s jargon. . . . Those who see their job as “corporate branding” (read advertising or marketing) take a different tack. They see their ultimate job as selling things and building value (pp. 34–5).

After reminding his readers that “marketing is the mother of us all” (p. 35), Gedulig (1999) said that “brand is more tangible, measurable, and manageable” (p. 36) than reputation. But just what is a brand? According to Gedulig, “The challenge [for branding] is to identify the perfect attribute—the one that will provide a halo effect over all other attributes—and to create a powerful communication program around it” (p. 36). With this definition, Gedulig used a common definition of image to define brand (a set of attributes associated with a product or organization).

Olins (2000) said that the branding literature has been extended recently from thinking of brands as applying only to products to the concept of an overall corporate brand. Today, he said, stakeholder groups overlap so that “when the corporation is in the public eye, it has to coordinate all aspects of its communication and behavior” (p. 60). “Brands,” he added, “are the device we use to differentiate between otherwise almost indistinguishable competitors. Without clear branding, in some fields we literally could not tell one product or service from another” (p. 61). Olins also suggested that people could have a relationship with a brand: “They have an immense emotional content and inspire loyalty beyond reason” (p. 63). Thus, his discussion suggests that brands could consist of three things: the behavior of an organization (often defined as a component of organizational identity (see, e.g., Van Riel, 1995, p. 57), communications/messages to define differentiating attributes of an organization or product, or relationships with an organization as people conceptualize that organization.

Huey (2002), in a letter to the editor of PR Week, tried to clarify the difference between reputation and brand by pointing out that brand can be used more easily as a verb (as in branding) whereas reputation is used more easily as a noun (“reputationing” is not yet a word). Reputation, he explained, is based more on performance whereas “brand image” . . . “is based more on communication effects than on actual performance” (p. 8).

Huey’s (2002) distinction between a noun and a verb helps to explain why we, like Verčič (2000a), see the use of concepts such as reputation, image, and brand as fads to rationalize the value of what a large proportion of public relations firms and practitioners have done since the middle of the nineteenth century, and continue to do: secure publicity for their clients or employers. Those who prefer branding as a concept acknowledge the centrality of messaging, and they approach public relations as they do advertising. To them, branding is a verb used to describe the strategic creation of messages to differentiate the attributes of one organization or product from another. When clients or employers ask why public relations is important (usually meaning why publicity is important), traditional public relations practitioners use the logic of branding to respond that messages produce a distinct reputation, image, or brand.

Cognitive concepts such as image, reputation, and brand are central concepts in the paradigm that J. Grunig (2009) has called the symbolic‒interpretive approach to public relations—the idea that the purpose of public relations is to creative favorable cognitive interpretations in the minds of publics in order to negotiate the meaning of organizational behaviors with publics and to buffer, or disguise, these actions from publics. This paradigm differs from J. Grunig’s (2011) strategic management paradigm, which conceptualizes public relations as a way of giving voice to publics in strategic decisions and of negotiating organizational behaviors with publics rather than simply negotiating the meaning of those behaviors.

By and large, we maintain that the concepts of reputation, image, and brand all refer to cognitive representations in the minds of publics. Cognitive representations do play a role in the strategic management paradigm—although not the central role they play in the symbolic‒interpretive paradigm. To make the discussion easier, therefore, we will use the term reputation to refer to cognitive representations and as a surrogate for the other terms.

Assessing the Value of Reputation

For the logic of this symbolic‒interpretive rationalization to hold up, public relations practitioners want evidence that a reputation (or image or brand) contributes financial value to an organization and that spending money on public relations improves reputation. Several researchers have attempted to establish those links for corporations ranked highly on reputational indexes.

Accountants traditionally have attributed part of the market value of a corporation to goodwill—the portion of market value that exceeds the tangible assets of the corporation. Fombrun (1996) called this difference Reputational Capital, “the amount by which the company’s market value exceeds the liquidation value of its assets” (p. 92). Using this rationale, Fombrun calculated the value of reputation to five companies that have “dominated their product categories since 1923 and proven to be the most durable of all time” (p. 92):

For Coca-Cola, that number came to about $52 billion in March 1993, placing Coke among the world’s most valuable corporate brands. A similar calculation put Gillette’s reputation at $12 billion, Eastman Kodak’s at $11 billion, Campbell’s at $9 billion, Colgate’s at $8 billion, and Wrigley’s at $4 billion (p. 92).

Several researchers have gone further and attempted to establish a more direct link between reputation and financial performance—most using Fortune magazine’s annual ranking of most admired companies. Bergen (2001) explained Fortune’s own calculations:

In its discussion of the rankings, Fortune also emphasized the correlations between standing on the list and financial returns. A chart accompanying the 1999 list showed that Fortune’s top ten most admired c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Author Biographies
• Foreword (By James Grunig)
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• SECTION I The Evolution of Relationship Theory
• SECTION II Expansion of Organization-Public Relationships
• SECTION III Emergent Perspectives: Culture, Globalization, and New Technologies
• Index