Corporate Reputation

Corporate reputation concept can be defined as “The perception of the subjects like company’s strategies, policies, regulations, rules, employees’ attitude, advertisements, logo, buildings’ shape and design by the customers, competitors, suppliers, credit grantors, strategic partners, employees etc.” As it can be noticed, the corporate reputation is the evaluation of all the activities of the institution from the past to the present, by the people both inside and outside the company and by the institutions; who adapt these in their thoughts and reflect these to their behaviours. This concept contains both pragmatic and reflexive apprehension. The corporate reputation takes over the role of a device in the pragmatic apprehension in which the company’s main target is the profit maximization and thus the performance of the manager to achieve this target, is taken into account. In reflexive apprehension, the thought that beyond profit, the company is responsible for its shareholders and it has to reflect this responsibility to all its applications to provide corporate reputation, takes place.

Reputation in the management literatüre has been examined at both the individual level and corporate level. Individial or personal reputation has been referred to as a shared perception by others of a person’s attributes or behavior. People are motivated to manage their impressions because they have a goal of creating and maintaining a certain identity that they find rewarding or useful. To do so, they need to behave in certain ways that are consistent with the desired identity or reputation. Also, because they are reflections back to do person from others, reputations may provide feedback to the individuals that their objectives have been obtained.

At the organizational level, reputation has been defined as how others evaluate an organization over some period of time. The reputations of corporations are important because they can be viewed as intangible assets for the firm that can contribute to building and sustaining competitive advantage. Firms need to maintain relationships with many different constituents, and a positive reputation with these groups (suppliers, shareholders, and customers etc.) is considered an important resource, because it may be level-aged to entice these stakeholder groups to provide necesarry resources to the firm. The corporate reputation is composed of 7 fundemantal components such as:

• Emotional Attraction: It represents stakeholders’ perception of the culture of the institution, in other words, the main values, beliefs, material cultural components and language.   
• Vision and Leadership: The shareholders with vision and leadership properties would have very important contribution to the institution. 
• Knowladge and Talent: It contains components such as innovation, contributions of the managers and staff with high qualifications and performance. 
• Environmental Responsibilitry: It expresses the importance of being concious about environment. 
• Quality: It expresses the importance of being customer focused in all the processes, like meeting the expectations of the customers in terms of products and services, determining the customer needs, after sales services, etc., not only the compliance with the quality standards. 
• Financial Reliability: It contains the optimum profişt, investments and risk management. 
• Social Responsibility: It contains the produce that are good for both the stakeholders and the society, and the responsibilities of the companyfor the society. 
• Corporate reputation is a 4 level process. This process contains corporate reputation; identity, corporate Image, brand and reputation levels.
• Identity; consists of a company’s defining attributes, such as its people, products and services.
• Image; may be described as a central nervous arousal pattern combined with perception, goal-oriented behavior, and cognitive object evaluation. Image, a reflection of an organization’s identity and its corporate brand. The organization as seen from the viewpoint of one constituency. Depending on which constituency is involved (customers, investors, employees, etc.) an organization can have many different images.
• Corporate brand, a brand that spans an entire company which can also have disparate underlying product brands. Conveys expectations of what the company will deliver in terms of products, services, and customer experence. Can be aspirational.

Reputation, the collective representation of multiple constituencies’ images of a company, built up over and based on company’s identity programs, its performance and how constituencies have perceived its behavior (Argenti, Druckenmiller:3). According to Fombrun, reputation, a perceptual represantation of a company’s past actions and future prospects that describe the firm’s overall appeal to all its key constituents when compared to other leading rivals şeklinde tanımlanabilir. Reputation can be defined in terms of its perceptual nature as, “the empirical truth of corporate reputation comes from whatever the respondents say”, which develops from “direct experiences with the company, any other from of communication and sembolism that provides information about the firm’s actions and/or a comparison with the actions of other leading rivals”. Corporate image can be created, but corporate reputation must be earned.