Corporate America will no doubt be delighted to know that driving vast numbers of employees to suicide is no impediment to enjoying a good corporate reputation—or even the best corporate reputation in the world.
In fact, survey respondents ranked Apple “the No. 1 company in the areas of products and services, vision and leadership, financial performance, and workplace environment.” I kid you not!
There are only two possible explanations for this dissonance, neither of which is addressed in the press release from Harris Interactive. The first is the reputation is completely disengaged from corporate behavior; the other is that this particular measure of reputation is fatally flawed.
Let’s hope it’s the latter; otherwise everything we believe as public relations people is pretty much irrelevant.
Fascinating and more than a little disturbing. I can only suggest that Apple’s unique place as a hybrid somehow outweighs or blurs the dissonance.
If there was a comparable company with similar outsourcing practices then maybe you could draw firmer conclusions. That doesn’t explain why Foxconn is only ever associated with Apple when so many other major device manufacturers work with them.