A Study on the Perceived Effectiveness of Public Relations Tools in Communicating the Corporate Image of SUN Cellular

Abstract

The importance of image cannot be overemphasized. According to Marconi (1996), “a good image, nurtured protected and brought to full bloom can create a halo that will light up the personality, the product, the company and the stock market". Given this, it is only important that organizations have control over their corporate image. To be able to do this, a company needs a communication tool which will aptly convey this image. Public relations, as defined by Fill (1995) is "a series of programs that aim to develop and enhance some of the identity cues used by the stakeholders to develop their respective images of the organization and its products." The main problem for this study is "What is the perceived effectiveness of public relations tools as used by SUN Cellular to convey their corporate image?". Under this main question are four sub questions which are: 1) What are the existing public relations tools used by the company?; 2) What is the corporate identity of the company?; 3) What is the corporate image of the company? 4) How similar are the corporate image and corporate identity of the company using the coorientation model? The study used two qualitative tools for data-gathering: key informant interview and focus group discussions. The interview was used to identify the public relations tools used by the company and also to ascertain what the identity of the company is. The focus group discussions were held to determine the corporate image of the company based on one of their target publics which are the students of the University of the Philippines, Manila. It was concluded that the company uses mostly advertising materials as their public relations tools. SUN Cellular had a good identity while the public had some negative perceptions about SUN in terms of some of the categories used to measure the corporate image. Upon comparison of the corporate identity and corporate image using the coorientation model, it was found out that there was a significant difference in the corporate identity and corporate image of the company. This may have been affected by the fact that they use advertising materials as their PR tools. The people also had a bad image of SUN especially because of the lack of signal and bad services. Too much service also tends to be confusing for the consumers and it reflects negatively on SUN. Lastly, it can be said that the image coming from the public are not only affected by the advertisements but are the results of other media as well.