Reputation and the Corporate Brand

Abstract

Organizations increasingly recognize the importance of corporate reputation to achieve business goals and stay competitive. In recent years, companies as large and prominent as Arthur Andersen and Bridgestone/Firestone learned hard lessons about how quickly a damaged reputation can harm employee and customer loyalty, threatening a company's financial well being and even its viability. Public confidence in business is low, and public scrutiny of business is high. The proliferation of media and information of the past two decades, the demands of investors for increased transparency, and the growing attention paid to social responsibility all speak for a greater focus on the part of organizations to building and maintaining strong reputations. Although factors contribute to an organization's reputation, this report presents the best current thinking on the corporate brand as it relates to reputation from the viewpoints of a leading academic and a senior practitioner of corporate communication. The discussion is prefaced with some definitions of key terms in the corporate identity/brand/reputation lexicon. Then a closer look is taken at corporate branding and why more companies are focusing on carefully managing this effort. Finally, corporate branding is related to corporate reputation and the authors discuss the implications of this relationship for businesses.