Corporate Reputation and Competitiveness

Citation

Davies, G., Chun, R., Da Silva, R.V. and Roper, S. (2003), "Corporate Reputation and Competitiveness", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 148-149. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccij.2003.8.2.148.1

For academics and students of public relations, reputation studies are now a core component of the corporate communication and public relations discipline. It also provides a major part of the fee income for practitioners and consultants. This holds true whether an organisation is in the public, private or not for profit sector. For most organisations, the philosophy is to monitor and measure, where possible, perceptions of the organisation and what it values from the perspective of all stake holders.

This book attempts to present a new approach to measuring reputation, albeit heavily dependent on two stakeholder groups, namely customers and employees. It offers detailed results of studies showing the interaction of customer/employee satisfaction in relation to the way customers and staff feel about the organisation itself. The result has been to introduce a corporate reputation chain model that is intended to be useful to managers and students in terms of understanding and measuring the role that corporate reputation plays in competitiveness.

The book is divided into two parts: Reputation as Strategic Management and Managing Reputation by Managing Corporate Personality.

The 11 chapters review the traditional approach as well as defending the management of their reputation chain model. It relies heavily on fundamental aspects of marketing theory as one would expect with customers as a key stakeholder sample – some would say to the detriment of the empirical literature in HR and corporate communication – but nevertheless this is a helpful contribution. With 88 figures and 19 tables, this alone will bring joy to both tutor and tutee!