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84 Mapping the Field

actually purchase Coca-Cola) therefore can be treated as a company’s intangible asset
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(brand equity or reputation) and be put on the balance sheet. This, by all accounts,
is a form of circular reasoning, where perceptions and assets are intimately linked, yet
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equalled (assets = perceptions), and this brings the danger that firms are not fully
conscious of the dynamic nature of reputation and the variation that may occur as a
result (e.g. when favourable perceptions of brands do not lead to purchase-related
behaviour, resulting in a lower market value and a consequently lower value being
placed upon the intangible asset associated with a company’s reputation).The first
important element of the reputation construct is thus: that it refers to the perceptions
of individuals and stakeholders with regard to an organization, while the corporate
profile (and the asset and market value arising from it) is denoted as an organization’s
corporate identity.
A second important element is that a reputation is formed by multiple stake-
holder groups.This, again, is a common misperception in the literature and in the
views of many managers, as reputation is often imbued with a single, corporeal and
monolithic quality as if there would be one single reputation of an organization or
only one way in which it is known. Such a view of course fails to account for the
diffuse ways in which an organization and its assets come to be valued by various
stakeholder groups over time. Rather than presuming a monolithic reputation, different
stakeholder groups of an organization are exposed to and look for different signals
or messages, and as a result form a reputation, which in its properties or attributes is
likely to be distinct from views and impressions held by other stakeholder groups.An
organization’s characteristics and assets, however broadly defined, thus represent
different values to different stakeholder groups, in turn guarding us from the hasty
conclusion that the Fortune or FT rankings, for instance, which are based only on
executives’ evaluations of an organization, unequivocally represent the reputation of
a particular organization.
The third and final element of reputation that needs to be clarified is that it
involves not just a general impression but also an evaluation of the firm by stake-
holders.This nuance is crucial, and pinpoints the difference between the corporate
image and corporate reputation constructs.While both are the products of a multiple-
variable impression formation process that includes cues from the organization’s pro-
jected identity, as well as word-of-mouth and reports from the media (see Figure 3.4),
the image and reputation constructs differ in one theoretically important respect.
Images concern the immediate impressions of individuals when confronted by a
signal or message that comes from an organization, while reputations are more
enduring general estimations established over time. Conceptually, image may be
defined as the immediate set of meanings inferred by a subject in response to one or
more signals from or about a particular organization. Put simply, it is the net result
of the interaction of a subject’s beliefs,ideas,feelings and impressions about an organi-
zation at a single point in time. Reputation can be defined as a subject’s collective
representation of past images of an organization (induced through either communi-
cation or past experiences) that is established over time. Images might vary in time
due to differing perceptions, but reputations are more likely to be relatively inert or
constant, as individuals and stakeholders retain their assessment of an organization
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built over time. Gray and Balmer, two academics, illustrate this distinction between
the image and reputation constructs: