The first asks respondents about their perceptions of the company‟s behaviour in its role, for example, as an employer, and is then a measure of cognition or beliefs held about that organisation. The second asks respondents to assess how well certain traits describe the company and is then a measure of affect or the more emotional associations being made. There is a debate amongst those who research reputation as to the relative merits of each approach (e.g Berens and van Riel 2004; Chettamrongchai 2010) which reflects a longer standing debate in the same field as to how to measure this important intangible asset (Fombrun et al 2000b; Davies et al. 2001; Walsh and Weidemann, 2004; Chun 2005). The origins of this thesis come from that debate and the need to shine some objective light on the issues involved.