Aer Lingus 4th best reputation among consumers with Ryanair close to last...

I logged onto their website to get the report but it sent me the 2021 report.

I have no idea what methodology they use to rank organisations.

It would be interesting to have some sort of independent assessment of the different consumer serving organisations.

On airlines, they could survey issues like price and on-time flights and time to answer the phone etc.

A bit like the way Which? reviews products.
 
I have no idea what methodology they use to rank organisations.
They use their own (?) Ireland RepTrak methodology but there doesn't seem to be any useful explanatory information about it on their website.
 
The survey is produced by The Reputations Agency, which is a commercial PR and communications consultancy. No offence to them, but the main reason they produce it is to attract attention to the services they themselves offer for managing and enhancing brand and reputation. The point is to get some public coverage of the issue of reputation and to promote the idea that reputation matters so that business will be more likely to engage the services of agencies like, well, The Reputations Agency.

Given this, the methodology underlying the survey isn't all that important. The Reputations Agency doesn't actually care who comes first in the survey and who comes last; they just want to get people talking about reputation, brand and public image. From that point of view a survey whose methodology is obscure and/or a bit suss is just as good as a survey whose methodology is transparent and robust. And the former kind of survey is probably easier and cheaper to produce.

So, call me a crusty old cynic if you want, but I suspect that if you take more than modest interest in the methodology underlying this survey, you may be taking more interest in it than The Reputations Agency ever did.
 
So, call me a crusty old cynic if you want, but I suspect that if you take more than modest interest in the methodology underlying this survey, you may be taking more interest in it than The Reputations Agency ever did.

But then I would contact RTE and ask them to stop covering it.
 
But then I would contact RTE and ask them to stop covering it.

Well, I think the coverage should draw a bit more attention to who produces this survey, and their interest in producing it.

But, in my experience, journalists are as glad as anyone else if someone does their work for them. Businesses like The Reputations Agency would be well aware that if you supply journalists with a useful chunk of copy that they can top and tail and file as a story, they will cheerfully do that.

I've done this myself — with the highest of motives and purely for the public good, naturally. But I was surprised how easy it was to get several paragraphs that I had written turning up word-for-word as the main section of a story in the business pages of a national daily, credited to a staff journalist. As in this case, my aim was to get coverage of certain issues, and to have the firm I then worked for (who could supply services useful to people affected by those issues) mentioned in the article.

Is it any wonder I'm a crusty old cynic?
 
The Irish Times also covered it


And the Indo

 
I’ve written press releases that are published verbatim despite the most obvious spin I put on things. It’s always amazed me how credulous almost all journalists are.

I know a journalist who does serious, semi-investigative stuff on new topics. He says it’s a hell of a lot harder than just filing whatever drops in your inbox. He sometimes goes weeks without filing a story and that just wouldn’t be tolerated in most news organisations which have space to fill.
 
I’ve written press releases that are published verbatim despite the most obvious spin I put on things. It’s always amazed me how credulous almost all journalists are.
Worth reading "Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies where he covers such "churnalism" whereby press releases are regularly repurposed as newspaper content with little or no modification or fact checking.
 
I got the report which contained the three attached pages on methodology. They are not sufficient so I have asked them for more information.

Brendan
 

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