Reputation Management

Revised Edition

Elearn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781136368677
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Stuck for ideas, inspiration or just want to work differently? Management Extra brings all the best management thinking together in one package. The books are practical and well structured to provide an in depth treatment of these management topics.

Titles in the series:
* Business Environment
* Change Management
* Development for High Performance
* Effective Communications
* Financial Management
* Information and Knowledge Management
* Leadership and Management in Organisations
* Leading Teams
* Making Sense of Data and Information
* Managing Markets and Customers
* Managing for Results
* Managing Health, Safety and Working Environment
* Managing Legal and Ethical Principles
* Managing Yourself
* Positive Working Relationships
* Project Management
* Quality and Operations Management
* Reaching Your Goals Through Innovation
* Recruitment and Selection
* Reputation Management

The series fuses key theories and concepts with applied activities to help managers examine how they work in practice. The books are created with individuals in mind. They are designed to help you improve your management
skills. Management Extra can also be used in conjunction with management programmes of study aligned to standards.

Each of the books has case studies, self assessments and activities all underpinned by knowledge and understanding of the frameworks and techniques required to improve performance. Management Extra provides managers and trainers with a handbook for action and development.

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--Russell Jeans, Learning and Development Manager,
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"All the essential concepts are here, presented in an easily digestible format with lots of up to date case studies and
references – but, most importantly, with plenty of thought provoking activities and self-diagnostic exercises to make the learning personal and transferable."
--Peter Manning, Head of Training & Development, News International Newspapers Ltd

Image and reputation

Image and reputation are closely related but they are not the same. Here are two aspects that help explain the difference:

Image	Reputation
Is built	Is earned
You have to create and promote an image. It is very much something you build to show others.	A reputation is something you gain over time through your actions. It is very much what people see in you.
Is a cost	Is an asset
You pay to create it and you pay to project it. The more image-conscious your market, the more it may cost.	Reputation has a direct link to the bottom line because organisations with good reputations are likely to attract more customers. It will also act as a buffer.

Some organisations have difficulties coming to terms with reputation, especially new companies that have a need for instant awareness and sales and so focus their efforts on image building. But for an image to remain credible in the longer term an organisation must also focus on building some substance – its reputation – to back it up.

In this theme you will:

Distinguish between reputation and image

Explore how reputation and image affect the attitudes that people hold about organisations

Assess the value of a reputation and consider how it should be managed

Identify five different types of image and the interplay between them.

Creating and managing a reputation

Organisations, like people, acquire complex reputations. The reputation may be good in some respects and bad in others, or it may be that the organisation has a reputation for a particular type of behaviour that is perceived as good by some people and bad by others.

The sources of knowledge which inform a reputation are:

Corporate reputations are aggregate perceptions of outsiders about the salient characteristics of firms.

Fombrun and Rindova (2000)

1 Direct experience of dealing with the organisation

2 Hearsay evidence from friends, colleagues and acquaintances

3 Third-party public sources such as newspaper articles, TV documentaries and published research

4 Organisation-generated information such as brochures, annual reports and advertising.

Figure 1.1 contrasts the degree of control that a PR manager has over these information sources with the influence of the information sources on attitude.

Figure 1.1 Hierarchy of information sources

Managing reputation is more than just an exercise in spin. Spin doctoring is a process of putting a good face on unacceptable facts, whereas managing reputation is a process of ensuring that the facts are themselves acceptable.

Managing reputation is about ensuring that everyone's experience of the organisation is in keeping with the reputation the organisation has or hopes to build. This means that everyone within the organisation has a role to play.

How attitudes are formed

Reputation and image both affect the attitudes that people hold towards an organisation. An attitude can be described as a tendency to behave in a certain way towards something. A person's attitude to an organisation might, for example, affect whether they would apply for a job or buy goods.

Figure 1.2 shows how attitudes are formed from three elements:

Cognition – what someone knows about an organisation

Affect – how someone feels about the organisation

Conation – how someone intends to behave towards the organisation.

Figure 1.2 Components of attitude

In other words, someone's attitude might be formed on the strength of their knowledge of an organisation (cognition), or on a gut feeling (affect), an irrational sense that something is good or bad about the organisation or on a behavioural event (conation) like direct experience of dealing with the organisation.

Reputation describes the expectations that people have about the organisation's future behaviour. It is based on knowledge of the organisation and is the cognitive element of attitude.

Image, on the other hand, is the affective component of attitude. It is the gut feeling or the overall impression that the organisation's name and brands generate in the minds of the organisation's public.

By providing information that appeals either to the conscious, cognitive or to the affective, emotional aspect of a person's thinking, it is possible to destabilise and change existing attitudes.

Skoda was successful in doing this during the 1990s following the takeover by Volkswagen. Having shared with other Eastern manufacturers the reputation for being clumsy, unreliable and old-fashioned, the company was in desperate need of an improvement to its reputation. In order to change attitudes, the company needed first to destabilise the existing attitude and it chose to do so by using the direct route of providing new information. To do this, the company used the advertising slogan, ‘We've changed our cars – can you change your mind?’ This did not in itself change attitudes, but it did encourage people to question their attitudes towards Skoda and seek out further information. Subsequent advertising has appealed to the emotions in order to build a new attitude.

Activity 1

Assessing current attitudes

Objective

Use this activity to analyse the attitudes of your colleagues and friends towards the organisation. You can use the organisation you work for or another organisation with which you are associated – a club or hobby society would work just as well for the purposes of the exercise. The objective of this exercise is to enable you to evaluate current attitudes within the organisation; in many cases, this will indicate how altitudes need to be changed. In cases where the attitudes might be deemed to be appropriate, the exercise should help you consider ways to maintain those attitudes in the longer run.

Task

Using the matrix provided, analyse the attitudes of your colleagues towards the organisation. You can use the same matrix to analyse the attitudes of outsiders (for example, friends or family members) in order to make comparisons between insiders’ attitudes and outsiders’ attitudes. You will, of course, need to ensure that people's answers are brief!

Respondent

Knowledge about the organisation's re...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Activities
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Series preface
• Introduction: having a good reputation counts
• 1 Image and reputation
• 2 Creating and managing a corporate image
• 3 Creating and managing brand image
• 4 Managing the internal image
• 5 Managing the external image
• References