Sustainability is central to both business and academics. The cooperation of business with its close stakeholders is possible only through communication. Intangible assets and facilities are important values of corporations. This chapter gives a new perspective to reputation management strategies in the aspect of sustainable communication. It shows the effectiveness of sustainable communication in terms of corporate reputation.
TopIntroduction
The concept of sustainability comes to the forefront as one of the most widely discussed topics in organizational development. Many industries investing throughout the world attempt to comply with the subjects is a part of the concept of sustainability, and to bring the name of organization into the forefront through the values that may come to the forefront from this aspect (Sassen, 2001; Hawkins, 2006; Fiske, 2010). In Turkey, the concept of “sustainability” is also one of the subjects, which is widely discussed by the academicians, and the public and private in recent years. The concept of sustainability includes many different fields and is related with the whole efforts aiming continuous development, improvement and coherence (Fiske, 2010; Ergen, 2016). Even if the sustainability is considered mainly from the ecological aspect, it is also a crucial issue of communication discipline. In harmony with this concept, the large organizations aiming to develop and also to adapt to the change carry out many social responsibility projects, and conduct social awareness campaigns. It is considered that these activities significantly contribute to the collective development in economic, environmental and social aspects, and they are useful in maintaining the strong organizational image in the public view. The concept of “reputation”, which has an important role in terms of the lifecycle of an organization or the sustainability of its activities as Koçak (2015) defines:
Is for the companies, the way of expressing that they are strong in cognitive ranking, reliable, resistant, fulfilling their social responsibilities, and investing to the future and have qualified and successful personnel, and it is revealed by using the top and most efficient communication channels in most democratic and widespread way considering the actual conditions of the country. (p. 6)
Corporate reputation is a popular field of communications with regard to the term corporate reputation is being discussed to understand its role and its dimensions by researchers in the last years (Kanto et al., 2016). It is considered that the stakeholders have important role in the contribution of sustainability activities, which are positioned as one of the elements constituting the corporate reputation. It is considered that the stakeholders have important role in the contribution of sustainability activities, which are positioned as one of the elements constituting the corporate reputation. In definition made by Fombrun, the reputation is described as the overall estimation of the organization by its stakeholders, which can be expressed by the net affective reactions of clients, investors, personnel, and also the society (1996).