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Article
Publication date: 14 August 2020

Leonard Wong, Lyon Tan, Rachel Wong and Su Lin Yeo

The overnight introduction of tens of thousands of dockless bike-share bicycles in Singapore with its indiscriminate parking drew the attention of the media, which generated…

Abstract

Purpose

The overnight introduction of tens of thousands of dockless bike-share bicycles in Singapore with its indiscriminate parking drew the attention of the media, which generated extensive news reports on the activities carried out by bike-sharing operators. Given the meteoric rise and fall of the industry, this study examines the influence of agenda-setting of news reporting on the public’s perception of the industry and the impact on the firms’ corporate reputation.

Design/methodology/approach

Utilizing the Reputation Quotient Index, the study content analyzed 147 textual data of online reports which were crawled over two years between 2017 and 2018 from six mainstream news organizations.

Findings

Our findings showed that the news reports carried more negative frames in the headlines and body content. It also found that only five out of six dimensions of the Index were emphasized with varying degrees of importance, indicating that the corporate reputation as determined by the media reports did not collectively represent the operators’ past actions and results with valued outcomes.

Practical implications

Practical implications discussed included the need to integrate corporate strategies into public relations programs and the importance of engaging the media to demonstrate congruence between business objectives and positive social impact on society.

Originality/value

Although the study limited its data collection only to online media reports, it is one of the few research to provide empirical evidence concerning the media’s influence on the public’s perceptions and reputation of the nascent bike-sharing industry.

Details

Corporate Communications: An International Journal, vol. 26 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1356-3289

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 5 November 2019

Anette Rantanen, Joni Salminen, Filip Ginter and Bernard J. Jansen

User-generated social media comments can be a useful source of information for understanding online corporate reputation. However, the manual classification of these comments is…

4307

Abstract

Purpose

User-generated social media comments can be a useful source of information for understanding online corporate reputation. However, the manual classification of these comments is challenging due to their high volume and unstructured nature. The purpose of this paper is to develop a classification framework and machine learning model to overcome these limitations.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors create a multi-dimensional classification framework for the online corporate reputation that includes six main dimensions synthesized from prior literature: quality, reliability, responsibility, successfulness, pleasantness and innovativeness. To evaluate the classification framework’s performance on real data, the authors retrieve 19,991 social media comments about two Finnish banks and use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify automatically the comments based on manually annotated training data.

Findings

After parameter optimization, the neural network achieves an accuracy between 52.7 and 65.2 percent on real-world data, which is reasonable given the high number of classes. The findings also indicate that prior work has not captured all the facets of online corporate reputation.

Practical implications

For practical purposes, the authors provide a comprehensive classification framework for online corporate reputation, which companies and organizations operating in various domains can use. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that using a limited amount of training data can yield a satisfactory multiclass classifier when using CNN.

Originality/value

This is the first attempt at automatically classifying online corporate reputation using an online-specific classification framework.

Details

Internet Research, vol. 30 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1066-2243

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 24 June 2020

Bernhard Swoboda and Nadine Batton

Extending the holistic research on corporate reputation (CR), the authors examine whether and how single CR dimensions affect consumers' intentional loyalty toward multinational…

Abstract

Purpose

Extending the holistic research on corporate reputation (CR), the authors examine whether and how single CR dimensions affect consumers' intentional loyalty toward multinational corporations (MNCs) across nations. They study the dimensions of the predominant customer-based CR scale of Walsh and Beatty (2007): customer orientation, product range quality, social/environmental responsibility, good employer and reliability/financial strength. Furthermore, important country-level moderators – embeddedness and country development – are studied.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors refer to hierarchical data on 32,811 consumer evaluations of a MNC in 44 countries using the still novel method of multilevel structural equation modeling.

Findings

The results underscore a strong relationship between CR in general and consumers' loyalty but identify different effects for the CR dimensions (e.g. product quality, social/environmental responsibility dominate). The important national institutions reinforce or diminish some – but not all – effects of the CR dimensions.

Practical implications

The results are of importance for finer-grained cross-national reputation management. Studying both national culture and country development shows that MNCs face tradeoff decisions. Accordingly, the authors provide a country portfolio, which offers options for standardized operations in groups of countries with similar country characteristics and CR effects.

Originality/value

Disentangling the five CR levers emphasizes that CR is not a pure signal of quality. Two main levers emerge: one stable across countries and one strongly depending on a country's degree of country development, for example. A finer-grained management of CR signals across nations is possible, especially in emerging countries, with increasing importance for MNCs.

Article
Publication date: 13 October 2021

Kristine L. Beck, James Chong and Bruce D. Niendorf

This study aims to examine whether a good corporate reputation leads to superior investment returns. Theory and empirics provide support for the idea that a good corporate…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to examine whether a good corporate reputation leads to superior investment returns. Theory and empirics provide support for the idea that a good corporate reputation improves firm value, but much of the previous research fails to consider the risk of the companies they study and relies only on accounting measures of performance such as return on assets. A complete picture of the relationship between corporate reputation and shareholder value should include risk-adjusted returns and correlation with benchmark returns.

Design/methodology/approach

The Harris Poll Reputation Quotient (RQ), based on the reputations of the 100 most visible companies, suggests that companies with a “solid reputation” are more likely to be attractive investments. The authors construct portfolios using deciles and the RQ categories, rebalancing annually as RQ rankings are updated. Returns are adjusted for risk using Jensen's alpha, the information ratio, the Sharpe ratio, Modigliani and Modigliani's M2 measure, and Muralidhar's M3 measure.

Findings

The results indicate that choosing a portfolio based on the highest RQ-ranked firms does outperform the market on a risk-adjusted basis, and that the relationship between rankings and time-weighted returns is roughly monotonic. The authors also observe that corporate reputation is persistent, and that the best and worst most-visible firms are more likely to be privately held.

Originality/value

This research adds to the literature by including both market-based return measures and risk in the examination of the relationship between corporate reputation and financial performance.

Details

American Journal of Business, vol. 37 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1935-5181

Keywords

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 16 July 2019

Abstract

Details

Global Aspects of Reputation and Strategic Management
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78754-314-0

Book part
Publication date: 16 July 2019

Enrique Carreras-Romero, Ana Carreras-Franco and Ángel Alloza-Losada

Economic globalization is leading large companies to focus on international strategic management. Nowadays, the assets referred to as “corporate intangibles,” such as corporate…

Abstract

Economic globalization is leading large companies to focus on international strategic management. Nowadays, the assets referred to as “corporate intangibles,” such as corporate reputation, are becoming increasingly important because they are considered a key factor for the viability of an organization, and companies therefore need to incorporate them into their scorecards for management. The problem is that their measurement is subjective and latent. These two characteristics impede direct international comparison and require demonstrating the accuracy of comparison via a minimum of two tests – construct equivalence and metric equivalence. As regards corporate reputation, construct equivalence was verified by Naomi Gardberg (2006). However, the subsequent studies did not address metric equivalence. Based on the results of a survey provided by the Reputation Institute (n = 5,950, 50 firms evaluated in 17 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia), the degree of RepTrak metric equivalence has been tested, using two different methodologies, multigroup analysis (structural equation model), and a new technique from 2016, the Measurement Invariance of Composite Model procedure from the Partial Least Square Path Modeling family. As one would expect from other cross-cultural studies, reputation metrics do not meet the full metric equivalence, which is why they require standardization processes to ensure international comparability. Both methodologies have identified the same correction parameters, which have allowed validation of the mean and variance of response style by country.

Details

Global Aspects of Reputation and Strategic Management
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78754-314-0

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 11 May 2010

Thomas M. Krueger, Mark A. Wrolstad and Shane Van Dalsem

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporaneous relationship between changes in corporate reputations and stock prices.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporaneous relationship between changes in corporate reputations and stock prices.

Design/methodology/approach

The Harris Interactive Reputation QuotientTM is used as a measure of corporate reputation. Stock return and risk measures are evaluated for each Reputation QuotientTM survey period for the years 1999‐2007.

Findings

The results provide evidence that, in the aggregate, firm reputations are procyclical. Additionally, firms with improved reputations enjoy lower volatility in their stock prices than firms with diminished reputations.

Research limitations/implications

Due to the Harris Poll Online methodology, it is not clear that the price changes occur concurrently with the change in reputation.

Originality/value

This paper contributes to the finance literature by examining the effect of a change in corporate reputation on stock price.

Details

Managerial Finance, vol. 36 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0307-4358

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 13 November 2017

Robert Kozielski, Michał Dziekoński and Jacek Pogorzelski

It is generally recognised that companies spend approximately 50% of their marketing budget on promotional activities. Advertising belongs to the most visible areas of a company’s…

Abstract

It is generally recognised that companies spend approximately 50% of their marketing budget on promotional activities. Advertising belongs to the most visible areas of a company’s activity. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the average recipient associates marketing with advertising, competitions and leaflets about new promotions delivered to houses or offices. Advertising, especially Internet advertising, is one of the most effective forms of marketing and one of the fastest developing areas of business. New channels of communication are emerging all the time – the Internet, digital television, mobile telephony; accompanied by new forms, such as the so-called ambient media. Advertising benefits from the achievements of many fields of science, that is, psychology, sociology, statistics, medicine and economics. At the same time, it combines science and the arts – it requires both knowledge and intuition. Contemporary advertising has different forms and areas of activity; yet it is always closely linked with the operations of a company – it is a form of marketing communication.

The indices of marketing communication presented in this chapter are generally known and used not only by advertising agencies but also by the marketing departments of many organisations. Brand awareness, advertising scope and frequency, the penetration index or the response rate belong to the most widely used indices; others, like the conversion rate or the affinity index, will get increasingly more significant along with the process of professionalisation of the environment of marketing specialists in Poland and with increased pressure on measuring marketing activities. Marketing indices are used for not only planning activities, but also their evaluation; some of them, such as telemarketing, mailing and coupons, provide an extensive array of possibilities of performance evaluation.

Article
Publication date: 20 August 2020

Arne Westermann and Jörg Forthmann

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extend an automated, algorithm-based analysis of online conversations of stakeholders in social media and other Internet media…

1906

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extend an automated, algorithm-based analysis of online conversations of stakeholders in social media and other Internet media can be used for reputation management.

Design/methodology/approach

Examination of the reputation of the 5,000 companies with the largest number of employees in Germany based on communication with these companies in 350m online sources on the German-speaking Internet within one year. The method is grounded on an adapted reputation model based on Fombrun.

Findings

The central result of the study is the identification of the ideal balance between the different dimensions leading to the best overall reputation. The resulting correlation matrix with the respective correlation coefficients (according to Pearson) thus forms the basis for the optimal reputation architecture.

Research limitations/implications

The discovered “optimal reputation architecture” refers to a German context. Future studies should investigate in how far the adapted model and the “optimal reputation architecture” also work for other cultures. It can be assumed that there may be differences as different dimensions, for example, sustainability, may have a different importance in other cultural contexts. Apart from the question if the “optimal reputation architecture” is also valid for other cultural contexts, the concept has to be validated for German companies as well as it is just based on the two described studies.

Practical implications

The method used shows that social listening can deliver valuable results for research in the field of reputation management as it expands the possibilities to investigate reputation on a large scale. The approach shows in how far scientific research can be expanded beyond classic content analysis as the number of items which can be analysed exceeds that of classic analytical approaches by far. Explicit and implicit experiences, which are the drivers of reputation, can be systematically recorded and analysed using social listening, thus delivering valuable insights in how stakeholders perceive the performance of a company in different dimensions.

Social implications

Measuring the reputation on the basis of social listening is very important for practical applications in companies, because the data is available digitally and can deliver up-to-date reputation values almost in real time – so that the communication can be aligned very quickly with current events. This makes it easier to implement and control the interaction between companies and their environment in the digital space.

Originality/value

The classic approach in reputation management is traditional market research. It is relatively expensive and takes a relatively long time to produce results. Reputation management based on social listening digitises reputation measurement, lowers costs and delivers results in a very timely manner. It might be the future of reputation measurement. This is relevant not only for practical purposes but also for scientific approaches.

Details

Corporate Communications: An International Journal, vol. 26 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1356-3289

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 30 August 2021

Abhijeet Biswas, Deepak Jaiswal and Rishi Kant

Global proliferation had a noteworthy impact on the Indian retail banking industry and mushrooming banks have entailed to emphasize on customer satisfaction (CS) quotient to…

Abstract

Purpose

Global proliferation had a noteworthy impact on the Indian retail banking industry and mushrooming banks have entailed to emphasize on customer satisfaction (CS) quotient to remain competitive. This study aims to illuminate determinants of CS and customer trust (CT) and their denouement in Indian retail banking.

Design/methodology/approach

The top six Indian private sector banks were selected hinged on market capitalization. A total of 460 responses from retail bank customers were gathered using a structured questionnaire. Direct and indirect relationships were analyzed with mediation and moderation by using structural equation modeling.

Findings

The study identifies determinants of CS and CT. The results manifest that perceived service innovation (PSI) and bank reputation (BR) considerably aggrandize CS and CT. Furthermore, CS strikingly magnifies customer loyalty (CL). The study also posits that CT partially mediates between the nexus of PSI and BR on the one side and CS on the other. Moreover, perceived risk moderates the association between CS and loyalty.

Research limitations/implications

The study demonstrates indispensable drivers of CS, CT and CL which may encourage bank professionals to hold on to their customers and enhance profitability.

Originality/value

Here is a dearth of literature on PSI and BR in the Indian banking industry. Thus, the study supplements literature by assimilating these constructs through a compendious conceptual model. The study is distinct as it evaluates mediating effects of CT in unfurling complexities of relationships among the underlying constructs.

1 – 10 of 349