CEOs are often the face of a company, but having a visible, or even well liked, CEO may not help a company's reputation in all situations. This is a topic I explored over the summer with PRIME Research thanks to the Grunig PRIME Fellowship. Specifically, I looked at how the tone and visibility of CEO media coverage is related to the tone and visibility of overall organization coverage.

CEO tone is more closely related to certain areas of coverage than others. The tone of coverage of financial performance or products has no significant relationship to a CEO's media reputation. This makes sense since those are tangible things that can be judged objectively separately from a CEO. In most cases it would not make sense for a CEO to be the spokesperson for a product or service. A customer is more likely to judge those things based on its own merits or their own experience. On the other hand, stories about corporate social responsibility or organization strategy are closely related to a CEO's reputation. Likewise, if a company is praised for its CSR efforts or corporate strategy, a CEO is likely to get credit for it.

 

While we plan to do more research on the causes and consequences of these relationships, this study helps confirm things practitioners have believed for years as well as give them some new things to think about.

Read (or comment on) the blog... 

Read this study...

Submit Abstract for Global Research Conference

Scholar/educators, grad students and practitioners are invited to submit abstracts for the Center for Global Public Relations Third Annual Global Research Conference on April 26 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

View from the Summit
By Frank Walton, City College of New York

The IPR Measurement Commission has been the organizer of the Measurement Summit each autumn for about the last decade. On October 3 - 4, the Measurement Summit re-convened in "3.0" form. The "where do we go from here" spirit informing all the topics considered ultimately gravitated on two imperatives:

1: United We Stand. Divided We Flounder. The quest for and enforcement of standards is not new to the Measurement Commission and the Summit. PR research professionals can legitimately cite real progress. PR professionals have got to do it or resign ourselves to some other function in the market-mix, multichannel communications model to do it for us.