Week9: Reputation Management: A Driving Force for Action

Reputation is undeniably essential to building an organisation's success. This is so as with good reputation, people tend to believe, have more faith in that particular organisation. As such, we are seeing more organisations participating/ sponsoring community events as they believe that by doing so,they are gaining reputation, which is good to their company in the long run. Take the Nike in London for an example, Nike donated 50,000 pounds to the national youth charity Fairbridge. Upon knowing that Nike is organising such marathons and also, contributing part of their revenue to charity, people will have a good impression of Nike and thus, Nike is working towards gaining better reputation.

One of the main challenges that organisations face with the public is Corporate Social Responsibility as the public and the organsiations have different aims. Organisations main motive is to gain profits while consumers want oranisations to work in a way such that the society benefits from it. I agree to the Moris Research by Lewis (2003) as he stated that it is hard to see how business can do things that benefit the society unless it is profitable. Furthermore it is true that in today's society, people will be skeptical about what is being done. Just like how the company BP which tried to promote their "Beyond petroleum" that is supposed to be environmentally friendly. Skeptics came out with terms such as "Beyond Preposterous" as they think that they do not truly mean what they are promoting but doing so mainly for profits. On the contrary to what Scott Cutlip thinks, I think that reputation and image can be used interchangeably as both words can be used to describe the impression, like good image and good reputation. Whether is it long term or short term, image and reputation are quite similar.

Moving on, I find Corporate Identity Structures really interesting. Whenever I walk into supermarkets, I realised that some brand logos are really interesting and it is these logos that are able to leave an impression in people's minds. It is truly a strategy that can be used to attract consumers in the long run, after a large group of people notice it.

Overall, it is the the planningof the organisation that can build up the organisation's reputation through creating of logos, brands. It is definitely a need to have a clear vision of what each organisation intends to achieve at the end of the day.