Creating Value through Reputation - Key Differences Between Corporate Reputation, Image and Identity
Creating Value through Reputation - Key Differences Between Corporate Reputation, Image and Identity

Summary/Abstract: In an increasingly competitive global economy, corporations are seeking new opportunities to differentiate against other players and to gain a sustainable market advantage. Moreover, evolving consumer demand and complexity of other stakeholders’ requirements have been constantly challenging corporations to rethink their strategic approach. Corporate reputation has turned into a highly debated topic on international management agenda and more and more business executives are starting to recognize that being held in high regards is, undoubtedly a window of opportunity. Although the concept has steadily gained momentum for the past few decades, ample debates still exist in the corporate reputation literature about how the construct should be defined and interpreted. This paper argues that the confusion surrounding the concept of reputation can be partially explained by using it as synonym with other corporate-level terms such as image and identity. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the linkage between these theories and to develop a framework to capture the disparate theoretical views that have been formulated in a structured approach. The paper goes a significant way to close this gap. It brings together various angles of interpretations in order to enable a better understanding of the complex and subtle relationship between reputation, image and identity. In times when companies are transitioning towards integrating the corporate reputation as a function of all their operations, it becomes important to provide a cohesive synthesis of the concepts and develop a coherent and holistic corporate reputation approach. The current research views reputation, image and identity as distinct, yet interrelated concepts. It builds on the idea that the reputation is a broader concept that incorporates the image and identity, as key components. The framework identifies and explains five pivotal arguments which are considered as being essential in differentiating the concepts.

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