毕业论文外文翻译--企业品牌的声誉和品牌危机管理文献翻译-中英文对照翻译

中文4030字

标题：Corporate brand reputation and brand crisis management

原文：For some years, the what, why, and how of recognising and addressing brand crisis – particularly corporate/organisational brand crisis –has occupied my research attention (note to reader: “corporate”and “organisational” are used interchangeably). Numerous corporate and non-profit entities have provided public clinical experiences of confronting serious reputational crises. Examples over recent decades include Exxon (the Valdez oil spill incident), Union Carbide (the Bhopal explosion), Perrier (benzene traces), Tylenol (deaths from tainted pills), the US Catholic Church (priest sex abuse), Martha Stewart OmniMedia (executive misbehaviour), Arthur Andersen (accounting scandals), the International Olympic Committee (bribery issues), and many others. All faced threats to their brands from deterioration in consumer and business customer approval and from decline in public trust.

While some were more product brand-rooted (e.g. Tylenol), all found their corporate brand affected, and efforts to rescue the brand were undertaken at the corporate level (e.g. Johnson and Johnson for Tylenol, marketed by J&J's McNeil Laboratories Unit). Thus these incidents provide a rich source of insight into the corporate brand. They illustrate a key dimension of corporate-level marketing.

“Can we as an institution, have meaningful, positive and profitable bilateral on-going relationships with customers and other stakeholder groups and communities?”. That was a central question of an organisation's corporate-level marketing orientation posed by John Balmer and myself in our treatment of an integrated approach to marketing at the institutional level (Balmer and Greyser, 2006).

We held (among other points) that corporate marketing is indeed a boardroom and CEO concern. In reflecting on corporate identity and reputation in times of brand crisis, one recognises the importance of corporate-wide orientation and the responsibility of the CEO and company-wide managers.

Sources of reputational trouble

Let me offer an anatomy of the kinds of reasons brands can be in reputational crisis, how to know that the situation is serious, and what

steps companies can try to take to prevent or if necessary to overcome such crises.

Reputational troubles can come in many forms, from a wide variety of causes and from many publics. Some have been sudden, such as when seven people died in a single day from tainted Tylenol capsules, when traces of benzene were found in bottles of Perrier and when an explosion in a Union Carbide facility in India killed many hundreds of people. Others were the result of problems that festered over longer periods, such as the priest sex abuse scandal affecting many Catholic archdioceses in the US, the accounting scandal that eventually ruined the once-respectable accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, or the bribery scandal over selection of host cities that tarnished the reputation of the International Olympic Committee. Some of the protest or concern comes from advocacy groups with a cause, some from disaffected consumers/customers, some from governmental/regulatory entities, and some from the general public.

Organisations must recognise the “what” of the issue generating the reputational threats, as well as “who” the involved public(s) is/are.

Here is a categorisation of different causes of corporate brand crises, with some examples and some brief explanations:

1. Product failure – Tylenol, Perrier, Firestone (tires implicated as the cause of many deaths in car accidents), the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, Intel's Pentium chip (flawed calculations), Peanut Corp. of America (salmonella).

2. Social responsibility gap –Nike (non-US labour and questionable working conditions).

3. Corporate misbehaviour –Arthur Andersen, Enron, Exxon (oil spill in Alaska), Merck (alleged suppression of early clinical drug trials of Vioxx), Siemens (corporate corruption in multinational fraud and bribery), Hewlett-Packard (Chairman indicted for spying on board members via questionable investigative means), IOC/SLOC (scandals regarding bid cities).

4. Executive misbehaviour –Martha Stewart, Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco).

5. Poor business results –Polaroid (failure to adapt technologically), Circuit City (giant retailer which let go many of its most knowledgeable store staff), and many others particularly in 2008.