UTILIZATION OF PR TOOLS WITHIN BUILDING A POSITIVE REPUTATION OF CZECH CHEMICAL COMPANIES

Abstract

Management and building of a positive corporate reputation is a frequently discussed topic in modern economic literature. The thing is that in the current market environment a positive reputation is a key intangible and hard-to-copy factor, which decides whether the company will be successful or not. Obviously, a positive reputation stems from a long-term successful operation of a company in the market, it is an image of personal experience, but it also results, to a certain extent, from the “public opinion” shared by the company’s shareholders. Therefore, what is crucial for a positive reputation of a company is not only quality customer service, but also the other corporate activities. A tool that is often emphasized in relation to building a positive corporate reputation is the company’s communication, particularly so-called “public relations”. The basic target of public relations is to contribute to creation of a positive corporate reputation among various groups of the company’s stakeholders. This paper presents and evaluates the outcomes of a primary qualitative survey, which mainly aimed to identify the rate of utilization of different public relations tools in creation of a positive reputation of the surveyed companies in individual groups of the company’s stakeholders. The research also aimed to find out which PR tools the companies consider most effective, specifically towards different groups of target stakeholders. Even though the qualitative survey was conducted through in-depth research performed at 3 large chemical companies in the Czech Republic only, we believe that it is of great benefit for effective reputation management of large industrial enterprises. The thing is that, for the time being, available literature does not provide classification of the perceived effectiveness of PR tools towards individual stakeholders of a company.