Research

Transatlantic Issues Monitoring

Reputation management is expectation management. Fulfilling expectations means knowing what preoccupies the public and how public opinion will develop. Consequently, the ECRS and fög - the Research Institute for the Public Sphere and Society of the University of Zurich (www.foeg.uzh.ch) – perform continuous, systematic analysis of the attention structures in key transatlantic media*. This involves identifying and weighting the most important communication events in Europe and in the U.S., and depicting their trends.

You will find an up-to-date overview of the most important communication events in the transatlantic media here every quarter. Here is the Transatlantic Issues Monitoring of August 2008.

* The media sample includes: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) and the New York Times (NYT).

The Caucasus conflict, the Olympic Games as well as the US presidential election campaigns dominated the public interest in the month of August. 

The escalation in Caucasian conflicts (conflict between rebels of south ossetian republic of Georgia and Abkhazia) is at Position 1 in the agenda of public attention. This is closely followed by the Olympic Games in Peking, which received great media coverage even beyond the athletic achievements. The Games were perceived as the detailed and perfectly organized staging of China’s growth (position 2) and were also discussed in the context of the doping scandals (position 12). 

A series of attacks during the Games that were attributed to the Uigur terrorists turned the public attention towards china’s minority politics (position 20). The presidential election campaign in the USA (Position 3) came into the focus of public attention in the month of the announcement of both vice-presidential candidates and the Democratic nomination day. Furthermore, a series of seats of war and troublespots in the Middle-east gained attention (position 4, 5, 6, 9, 16b). Pakistan’s president Musharraf received particular attention in the month of august when he stepped down and the coalition government split.

The US-economy (position 7) is critically monitored mainly due to the real estate and credit market crises (position 8 and 13) as well as the increasing costs of energy (item 10). In the context of the credit market crisis, actions for damages in the matter of auction-rate securities are put forth against the UBS and other banks (Position 18).

Contact: Dr. Mark Eisenegger

 

Monitoring and Measuring the Impact of Corporate Reputation
"Corporate reputation and corporate success - experiments with customers and private investors"

Contact: Prof. Dr. Manfred Schwaiger 

 

Reputation Management

A company’s reputation is largely determined by the thematic contexts that serve to position it among its various stakeholders (in the media, politics, economy, society, etc.). Thus, reputation management presupposes that a company fulfils its stakeholders' expectations with regard to its economic competence (business reputation) as well as the public’s social-moral expectations (social reputation), and that it adopts a distinctive position vis-à-vis competition in the context of the opinion market (expressive reputation). 

Intimate knowledge of the public agenda and its systematic alignment with the company’s specific strategic goals have become prerequisites for successful reputation management. Consequently, ECRS regularly compiles stakeholder reports, taking into account current topics in the various industries, such as today's climate change topic. In addition, ECRS develops case studies and expert opinions such as:

Pleon's Climate Change Stakeholder Report

Contact: Ralf Langen, Robert Wreschniok