Kelly Snowden, Marketing Manager, Wyndham Vacation Rentals (UK)
Why do I buy PR? It’s a Heineken reason – because PR reaches the parts other marketing channels can’t reach. It’s the independent endorsement that PR delivers. When a journalist writes an objective review of a property from our holiday cottage portfolio, readers and customers respect it. The inclusion of our brand’s URL on a popular magazine’s website is invaluable for us. Visitors come to www.cheznous.com and www.cottagesdirect.co.uk and have a look at our properties because their favourite media outlet has suggested it.

Of course at Wyndham Vacation Rentals (UK) we use many marketing and digital channels but PR is one of our favourites.

Graham Webb, UK Managing Director, Yorkshire Sales and Marketing Developments
www.yorkshiresmd.com

So your reputation requires managing, does it?
“Who cares about my reputation?” I have heard some business owners say in conversation……..and then I reply: “What do you know?”

Let us start with a statement that might upset some people. Never before in the history of marketing has a business’s reputation been so important!

Next question………….are you managing YOUR reputation?

If I ask you: NOW could you tell me your business’s reputation with each of its internal and external stakeholders?……….or am I just asking too many difficult questions?

Senior management today has to realize, that reputation can make or break a company’s bottom line. It can boost or kill sales, attract or put off investment and business partners, recruit or deter employees, influence legislators and regulators, and literally touch every audience.

Now that is some statement and if reading it makes you jump and think: “What am I doing in my business?”…then sorry……. but good!!!!

Corporate reputation management is conducted by using an array of sophisticated tools and techniques including competitive benchmarking, reputation scorecards, key performance indicators, journalist surveys, media content analysis, new media measurement, PR research, stakeholder evaluation, internal communications measurement, opinion polls, omnibus surveys, and crisis research. Tools and techniques, such as thought leadership studies, reputation survey and analysis, PR and communications measurement and rating methodologies, stakeholder research and corporate image surveys can all be designed to support corporate reputation management.* Wow that does sound complicated but stop for just one moment, and consider the alternative – a bad reputation

Imagine having to explain to your board of directors, or even worse the business’s Annual General Meeting why stock market share value is so low, or why so many good staff have left for the competition, or why sales are so low and then explaining that it was because the business’s reputation was so bad!!!

So if you are not…when are you going to begin managing YOUR business’s REPUTATION?

*A small quoted part of this paragraph taken from an article Corporate Reputation”
published in ‘An overview of Corporate Reputation’ 2008 – The International Journal