Corporate reputation affects the way in which
various stakeholders behave towards an organization,
influencing, for example, employee
retention, customer satisfaction and customer
loyalty. Not surprisingly, CEOs see corporate
reputation as a valuable intangible asset
(Institute of Directors 1999). A favourable
reputation encourages shareholders to invest in
a company; it attracts good staff, retains customers
(Markham 1972) and correlates with
superior overall returns (Robert and Dowling
1997; Vergin and Qoronfleh 1998). However,
many of these claims have been challenged as
being anecdotal or based on measures of
reputation that are flawed or conceptualizations
of reputation that are unclear. There are a
number of issues here relevant to academics
working in the emerging area of reputation
studies. Corporate reputation is still relatively
new as an academic subject. It is becoming a
paradigm in its own right, a coherent way of
looking at organizations and business performance,
but it is still dogged by its origins
in a number of separate disciplines.