special track strategic communication in collaboration with EUPRERA

Strategic communication for minimizingthe impact of fake news on corporate reputation

Romenti Stefania, Elanor Colleoni

Corporate reputations derive from information-based evaluation processes, which can happen with different degrees of interpretative power of the different stakeholders.
A key often unstated assumption underlying the concept of corporate reputation is that these messages can be trusted to accurately report about a given corporation. However, in our “fake news” era, this assumption might not hold true anymore. Therefore, the potential impact that fake news could have in the way individuals construct their beliefs and perceptions about a particular firm needs to be re-examined.
In this short paper, we conceptually and empirically explore how fake news can affect subsequent social evaluations of a company and the communication strategies a corporation can use to mitigate a drop of its corporate reputation due to exposure to fake news.

#corporate reputation #experimental design #fake news #Strategic Communication