Country reputation and performance: The role of public relations and news media

Planejamento e Políticas Públicas (PPP): n. 54, jan./jun. 2020

“…As several authors have demonstrated, 'media' constitute a stakeholder that can be analysed according to their "news coverage". Upon this basis, many researchers have analysed the association between foreign news and a country's image (Toledano and McKie, 2013;Jiménez-Martinez, 2013Jain and Winner, 2013;Lee and Hong, 2012;Szondi (2010), Kim and Yang (2008). Anholt's book Places (2010) dedicated a whole chapter (number 10) to the relation between media and national image.…”

“…Jain and Winner (2013) initiated a major study on country image, pointing out how media functions from a public relations perspective. Jain and Winner (2013) have investigated the United States of America's reputation and performance in 30 countries using a public relations framework, which has examined the relationship that international public relations and U.S.A. news media coverage have with public opinion and their economic performance. Using 1,086 (598 press releases and 488 news media articles) and public opinion data, content analysis was based on Anholt's dimensions (2010).…”

“…This study is grounded in the fact that the media represents one of the stakeholders of a country's reputation (Anholt, 2010;Dinnie, 2015;Lee and Hong, 2012;Toledano and McKie, 2013;Jain and Winner, 2013;Buhmann and Ingenhoff, 2015;. Undoubtedly, a country's branding derives from multifaced spheres, such as economics, politics, and diplomacy, but more than ever, the organisations responsible for those spheres depend on interactions with news outlets and media channels.…”

“…We recognise that any type of communication may have the potential to inform and shape people's knowledge about a country's image; however, relative to other channels, the media has also a capacity to influence the decisions of investors and consumers. As a result, several countries have, intentionally or not, examined their image via the global media and thereby understood their own country reputation using several approaches, for instance, South Sudan (Kim and Yang, 2008), Chile (Jiménez-Martinez, 2013), the United States (Jain and Winner, 2013) and Nigeria (Adegoju, 2016).…”

“…Part of the issue, as Newburry (2012, p. 3) highlights, is that country reputation "is a diverse topic with many intertwined levels, disciplines and theoretical perspectives". The field has made progress in relating country image to several knowledge domains , such as media (Custódio and Gouveia, 2007;Kim and Yang, 2008;Lee and Hong, 2012;Jain and Winner, 2013;Buarque, 2015;Adegoju, 2016;Jiménez-Martinez, 2017); public diplomacy (Szondi, 2007;Newburry, 2012;Buhmann and Ingenhoff, 2015), communications and public relations (Jain and Winner;Loo and Davies, 2006;Kim and Yang, 2008;Toledano and McKie, 2013;Buhmann and Ingenhoff, 2015), but paid insufficient attention to theorising country reputation. As a result, the main fields of country reputation, country branding, and nation branding lack consistent, comparable conceptualisations of the country image.…”