This doctoral research aims to investigate the reputation building process of companies
and to examine the applicability of western-developed theories about the uses of
corporate reputation in a non-western context. It is the first study that synthesises three
theories (value creation, strategic resources and corporate communication) to examine
the strategic consequences of the uses of corporate reputation.
Corporate reputation is an attribute or a set of attributes ascribed to a firm and inferred
from the firm’s past actions. It is the belief of market participants about a firm’s
strategic character (Weigelt and Camerer, 1988). Also, corporate reputation is the
public’s cumulative judgement of a firm over time (Roberts and Dowling, 2002).
The review of theoretical literature indicates the uses of corporate reputation by
business organizations can be theorized along six dominant paradigmatic perspectives:
1-public relations; 2-marketing; 3-management, 4-economic; 5-sociological; 6-finance
and accounting. The uses of corporate reputation in these six paradigms are
comprehensively discussed. The objective of this study is to establish the use of
corporate reputation in the development of brand image strategy. A review of the uses
of the concept of corporate reputation is discussed in detail in chapter 2.
The review of the literature also identified a research gap by showing that scarce
research has been conducted on how these three main functions (value creation,
strategic resources and corporate communication) affect a company’s brand positioning
strategy. The following research question thus is proposed: How do (Taiwanese
pharmaceutical) companies use their corporate reputation to develop a brand image
strategy?
The research hypotheses based on three theories (value-based theory, resource-based
theory and integrated marketing communication theory) appear in Chapter 3. The
research question is constructed theoretically, and then a conceptual model, which
begins with three antecedents of corporate reputation and simultaneously illustrates the
outcomes of their use, are discussed.