Reputaion Management: A Driving Force For Action

This chapter focuses on Corporate public relations, the challenges face by them and the reputation of the company.

Corporate public relations is highly demanding as it deals with lots of big firms in the market. They face challenges such as reputation management where they have to maintain and manage a company's image because it is related with the company's branding and identity. This is because the public and the media especially scrutinise big firms and they are always waiting to pounce on these firms and pint-point their mistakes. An example will be the live earth concert sponsored by Panasonic to save electricity. But the media stated that they are wasting lots of electricity through the show and emitting carbon dioxide through the flying of the singers to various locations. Thus, Corporate PR is challenging as they have to handle these kind of situations.

In my opinion, the most important thing that corporate PR practitioners should do is to have a good and understanding relationship with their stakeholders. This is because if a stakeholder is not happy about something, they might spread around the company's name and thus ruin the company's reputation. This is because corporate organisations are always associated with making profit and if they do not have a good reputation, they cannot make a profit.

Corporate PR practitioners face the dilemma of behaving ethically as sometimes companies who demand for better results might force them to behave unethically in order to generate revenue for the company. Thus the topic of corporate social responsibility is questionable and poses as a challenge to PR practitioners. One thing I know for sure is that if a company is caught red-handed for ethical issues, they should never deny it as it will only ruin their reputation even more.

Identity, reputation, image and branding are essential for the corporate organisation not only for generating revenue but also to gain the trust of the public and their future stakeholders.

Thus the elite practitioners are the ones that are usually employed by these corporate organisation as they have to be able to deal with these issues.