Insurance is one of the items we all have to purchase in our daily and professional lives. Whether it is health insurance to auto insurance, or if we are in a place where there are lots of floods and natural disasters, we can get home insurance as well. However, when it comes to public relations – is it appropriate for companies to get reputation insurance? The Wall Street Journal has a video that explains a bit more about the new offer from AIG.
This was one story that appeared in PR Daily and one company, AIG, has offered this line of insurance for clients with the use of two PR firms. Burston-Marsellter and Porter Novelli. This new service is called Reputation Guard – and one of the reasons this has been implemented is the fact that we are living in a reputation economy (which was focused primarily during this past RI Annual Conference in New Orleans) and this has become a primary focus for most corporations around the world.
When you think about this – what this option does for companies is to be able to recover some of the costs from various lawsuits and legal fees for having to deal with handling these various situations and giving them a step into helping to restore their reputation. However, the issue does come down to being prepared for all various situations that may arise in terms of a repetitional crisis.
This will all have to be explored and discussed further in the PR and Reputation Management community to see if this is going to be a trend to focus on within the industry, and whether or not this needs to be incorporated into different branches within PR (ex. media relations, crisis communications, social media, etc).
Future questions need to focus on how much coverage needs to be included for a reputation insurance plan and what this actually covers in these various areas within PR. In addition, does this mean that PR firms need to have a specialist within their organization who can help in setting up insurance plans when it comes to campaigns and working with clients? Also, what is the impact on a corporate and individual reputation when it is announced that they have a reputation insurance plan – what are the implications for this?
Hope you all are having a great day.
Best Wishes,
Karen
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