Reputation Management

Recently several events in the world have damaged countries ' reputation. The riots in England, or also the « Arabic revolutions », have had commons consequences, in damaging the reputation of these countries and creating instability on the public opinion. The concept of reputation is more commonly associated with company and Dalton and Croft (2003) define it such as “the sum values that stakeholders attribute to a company, based on their perception and interpretation of the image that the company communicates over time”. But we can also extend this definition to country, and Lewis (2011) explains that the reputation is “what people says about us” and raises the problem of reputation 's vulnerability. The impact of the reputation seems to be a powerful concept and we have to explore how country 's reputation can impact seriously, whom that is favorably or unfavorably, the country 's health through consequences, in individual and business choices. In a first part, we are going to show how reputation can act on the different significant actors of a country and can have a strong role on the country’s appeal. We are going to tackle the idea that perception of a situation is influenced by a lot of elements and the fact that country 's image result in different behavior. Then, in a second part, we are going to observe the complexity of managing reputation and the reason why leading action on reputation could be useful when crisis occur. The reputation concern a large range of actors, stakeholders, sure enough a country is made of lots of interactions. The visitor and the tourism’s sector, national companies and foreign companies, the FDI and investors, the workforce... All these forces create a dynamic environment and the reputation has to be good to attract and keep these stakeholders on the country. Anholt (2007) tackles the notion of competitive identity and he makes a connection with brand management. He explains the importance of competitive identity because of its

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