Reputation Management in Times of the Pandemic - Empirical Analysis of Selected Health Care Providers Operating in the Slovak Market

¹ University of Economics in Bratislava, Faculty of Business Management, Department of Business Finance, Dolnozemská cesta 1/b, 852 35 Bratislava, Slovakia
² Acuity Engineering & Consulting Service Ltd, 10327 122 St NW, T5N1M1 Edmonton AB, Canada

^* Corresponding author: frantisek.pollak@euba.sk

Abstract

The issue of corporate reputation management is one of the key areas in the process of building trust between the supply and demand side of the market. The services sector, which, as a rule, works predominantly with intangible products, is particularly vulnerable to reputational damage. The presented study aims to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the overall level of reputation of eleven Slovak teaching hospitals. The data sources used in the form of publicly available databases cover both the traditional factors of the brick-and-mortar market, as well as the factors related to the virtual Internet environment. The results of the analysis point to the fact that while the traditional level of reputation of the entities reflected changes in the market only to a relatively limited extent, the level of the online reputation of the analysed entities decreased significantly due to the pandemic. This finding underscores the fact about the fragility of reputation in the Internet environment. By comparing individual reputational factors in the pre-pandemic period with the situation during the peak of the third wave of the pandemic, the study offers a relatively compact knowledge base for formulating basic transformations for comprehensive research into the impact of a pandemic on corporate competitiveness.