Marketing communication: principles and practice

I D E N T I T Y
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I M A G E
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A N D R E P U T A T I O N
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BOX 10.1
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The newly opened Prada Society Café in Manchester is today dumping its name, menu
cards, tablecloths, and plates. After only nine days’ trading, the proprietors have been
forced to change the name of the café by the Milan fashion house Prada, which has
claimed intellectual property ownership of the trading name with full legal backing.

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How about those corporations that have a reputation for being friendly,
honest, and competent – are we really identifying a corporate personality?
What kind of people do you feel at home with and which threaten you? Those
who are in close contact are the ones we get on with, while others we try to
avoid. So it is for business corporations.
We need to distinguish between industry reputation and corporate
reputation. For example, there are reputable companies (Saga, for example)
operating in the package tour industry (which is not well respected).
CORPORATE REPUTATION
What is the significance of reputation? How does a strong, positive reputation
impact on business performance? What makes and influences a corporation’s
reputation? How can corporations protect and manage their reputation?
The Public Relations Consultancy Association’s website defines corporate
communications (see chapter eighteen for more on this) as: ‘the deliberately
planned management of the perceptions of an organization’.
Some people feel that public relations 
is
reputation management. Is there
more to it than publicity?
With so much said and printed about corporate reputation, why do we
still need to think more about this problem? Put bluntly, most managers
simply do not understand how reputation is created and communicated,
conclude Smythe 
et al
. (1992).
In everyday life, we do a lot of talking about reputation: when making
friends, inviting people to speak at seminars, deciding which course to study,
job searching, recommending products, and so on. Thus, reputation could
be defined as what is generally said or believed about a person’s or thing’s
character or standing.
We can also think of reputation as a state of being well reported on, or as
a set of judgements a community makes about the personal qualities of one
of its members (see Emler, 1990). But this is rarely a factual reporting of what
is but rather of what people believe to be:
Many a man would not recognize his reputation if they met on the street
(proverb)
The dictionary is full of words that are similar in meaning to ‘reputable’:
respectable; notable; honest; influential; of distinction. The term reputation
(meaning public recognition) stems from the term 
reputare
– meaning to think.
Reputation is what you need to get a job; 
character is what you need to keep it.
(Unattrib.)
Management efforts can be directed towards building a positive reputation,
but, rest assured, a reputation will be out there in the public sphere, whether
managed or not. Organizations may strive after an excellent reputation, but,