How important is a favourable Corporate Image prior to a Crisis?

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - General, grade: 2,1, University of Lincoln, 101 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this dissertation is to find out whether a favourable corporate image is important prior to a PR-crisis. This question is also being applied to Merck & Co. Inc., a pharmaceutical company in the U.S. which is currently having its VIOXX-crisis, while researching if their favourable corporate image is helping them to overcome the crisis faster. Furthermore an employee of Merck KGaA in Germany was interviewed, with the intention to find out whether the company has been influenced by the VIOXX-crisis since they are related through their names. The methodology is a critical review of the literature, in addition to the description of how to put together, employ and analyse an interview and a questionnaire, which was distributed to 180 students in England and Germany. The findings are comprised of the comparison of the results of the questionnaires and the answers of the interview with the literature. The favourable corporate image proves to be important prior to a crisis and a good relationship with the media should be built by the organisations in order to diminish the risk of moral panic. Referring to Merck & Co., Inc., their favourable corporate image and good relationship with the media give them a strong potential to overcome the crisis. The method had a limitation: the sample of the questionnaire are English and German students only and therefore do not represent the whole English and German population. The favourable corporate image and a good media management policy are valuable assets of a company, especially nowadays when bad news can be communicated rapidly by modern media tools, like the Internet.