‘Public Relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you.
Public Relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behavior. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.’
This argues that public relations is reputation management – but then goes on to suggest that the end result of public-relations-as-reputation-management is not reputation itself but rather ‘goodwill and mutual understanding.’
An appealing concept
Reputation management is an appealing concept for practitioners. It links public relations to the organisation it represents, and suggests a dialogue with senior managers around a topic of pressing importance.
In doing so, it provides an opportunity for practitioners to take ownership of the whole risk-issues-crisis management cycle and help organisations and senior executives steer the ship through treacherous waters.
Given this professional body and practitioner emphasis on public-relations-as-reputation-management, it’s surprising how few public relations scholars focus on reputation research.
Two challenges
Then there are two obvious challenges to the mantra that public relations manages reputation.
The first is that reputation is not under our control. Reputation, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So we can influence how our organisation is perceived, but can we claim full management control of this process? You would be setting yourself up for a fall by promising to manage a process you do not and cannot control.
There are some well-established models explaining the relationship between corporate identity and corporate reputation in the corporate communication and corporate identity literature to help you understand these concepts.
The second challenge is that if you say you manage reputation, you will very soon be asked how you measure and value reputation.
Reputation is considered an intangible asset. You can’t touch it (unlike property, or furniture, or stock in a warehouse) but it has a value and some auditors will put a value on it.
In reality, the senior PR manager is more likely to advise on the reputational implications of decisions. There’s a difference between being an adviser and being a decision maker.
All this talk of management, management consultants, auditors and share prices may suggest that reputation management is only relevant to the private sector.
Reputation has a greater resonance with external communicators than those responsible for internal communication.
