Page 96 - Corporate Communication

Cornelissen-03.qxd 10/9/2004 9:04 AM Page 85

Stakeholders, Identity and Reputation 85

Companies X and Y compared
Reputation factor Very poor Poor Average Good Excellent Factor
importance
Quality of management team X Y 4.3
Quality and range of
products XY 3.8
Community and
environmental responsibility X Y 4.1
XY 4.0
Financial soundness
Innovativeness of operations X Y 3.8
Industry leadership Y X 2.3

Figure 3.4 The corporate reputation of two companies compared

corporate image is the immediate mental picture that audiences have of an organization.
Corporate reputations, on the other hand, typically evolve over time as a result of consis-
tent performance,reinforced by effective communication,whereas corporate images can be
fashioned more quickly through well-conceived communication programs. 51
Corporate reputations can in this light also be seen as the focal effect that organiza-
tions should be interested in and focus on, rather than corporate image alone, which
concerns more fleeting or ephemeral perceptions.

Measuring reputation

In all, the above-mentioned properties of the reputation construct (i.e. a subject’s
collective representation of past images of an organization established over time)
provide the groundwork for researchers and managers with an interest in reputation,
for developing operational measures and for surveying opinions of important stake-
holder groups. For one, the time dimension (as reputation is an established percep-
tion over time) needs to be factored into the measurement process by having
respondents evaluate a company (vis-à-vis its nearest rivals) generally instead of having
them reflect upon a single instant (e.g. a crisis) or image (e.g. a campaign) in relation
to that company. Second, reputation is a perceptual construct, so simple proxy
measures of the assets, performance or output of a particular organization simply
won’t do, as these fail to account for the subjective, perceptual nature of reputation
and the longer period involved in its formation.And third, measurement and also the
sampling of respondents need to account for the various attributes upon which an
organization is rated by various stakeholder groups.
Different types of research techniques may be used to gather these reputational
data.These techniques exclude the publicly syndicated measures such as the Fortune
‘Most Admired Companies’ and FT’s ‘Most Respected Companies’, which are a
secondary source of research information that managers and communications prac-
titioners can tap into to gain some information about the standing of their compa-
nies (when these are included in the rankings). Better still is for a company to set up