Reputation as Matching Identities and Images: Extending Davies and Chun's (2002) Research on Gaps between the Internal and External Perceptions of the Corporate Brand

Abstract

Corporate reputation is defined as a construct representing aggregated perceptions of people in and around companies. A corporate personality scale was developed to measure identities as internal perceptions and images as external perceptions with the same instrument. We report here an application of this instrument and the replication of a previous study conducted by Davies and Chun in 2002 (Corporate reputation review 5(2/3): 144–158), by comparing two similar companies operating in the same industry. Perceptions of employees, students, journalists and professional colleagues were measured for each company. The reputations of the two companies were different in synchronization of perceptions of respondent groups for each company (one high and one low) and in their comparative scores from different respondent groups. The study discovered that two companies could be equally successful in performance while their reputations can be significantly different. The second significant theoretical implication of the study was the finding that a composite, aggregate measure of a corporate reputation can obscure as much as reveal perceptions of different valuing groups. The main practical implication of the study is that companies can achieve comparable performances despite having different personalities both in profile and in coherence. This implies that executives need to observe their organizations through various views, which should allow them more freedom of action and experimentation.