The customer is one of the vital “assets” for business. Business that lacks this important asset may face
the difficulty that operational income is less than operational cost; business losing customers may
confront the problem of a profit decline. Several studies have shown that improving service quality and
customer satisfaction results in better financial performance for business. However, more and more
researchers have realized that corporate image and corporate reputation are the most important factors to
form customer loyalty.
Many researchers in marketing have recognized the critical roles of corporate image and corporate
reputation in customer’ buying behavior. The two factors are particularly important in developing and
maintaining a loyalty on the part of customers. In other aspects, corporate image and corporate
reputation are generally considered as two distinct constructs which may be strongly related. Most of the
studies have analyzed corporate image and corporate reputation separately. At a most guarded level,
some authors have expressed a potential link between the two concepts.
With this in mind, the objective of this study is to describe the relationship between corporate image
and corporate reputation, and their impact on the customer’s loyalty. The understanding of these
relationships contributes to establish the distinction between image and reputation and to help
management use them more effectively in its communication strategy, thereby enhancing the firm’s
position. Moreover, because corporate image and corporate reputation are considered as the global
outcomes of the process of legitimating or the credentialing mechanism, their level of abstraction may be
high; consequently, they are complex to conceptualize and difficult to measure.