Corporate Reputation and Competitiveness
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Volume 5 Number 4
Corporate Reputation and Competitiveness Gary Davies, with Rosa Chun, Rui Vinhas da Silva and Stuart Roper Routledge, London; 2002; ISBN 0 4152 8743 X; 288pp; hardback, £24.99
Far too many managers, while espousing the importance of corporate reputation, seem to believe that managing reputation is a function for the communications or public relations departments. Similarly, these managers will argue that the best way to effect a change in reputation is to alter the company name and/or logo. Davies, Professor of Corporate Reputation at Manchester Business School, and colleagues effectively dispel these myths, beginning with the opening sentence of their book: ‘If you believe passionately that the best way to create a strong corporate reputation is to advertise, then return this book from where you purchased it and try to obtain a refund.’ Instead, the authors argue that the key to reputation management lies in ‘harmonising’ how company employees, especially front-line service workers, and customers view the company’s corporate personality. As the authors put it:
Corporate Reputation Review, Vol. 5, No. 4, 2003, pp. 368–370 # Henry Stewart Publications, 1363–3589
Page 368
‘Ours is a new approach to managing a company as a brand, something that depends more upon the emotional attachment that customer facing employees have with their organization and less upon the creativity of an advertising agency. Even having employees who are fanatical about their corporate brand is not enough. What they value about their organization should harmonize with what the most
important stakeholder group, customers, value in the corporate brand.’ Corporate Reputation and Competitiveness differs from many previous books on the topic of reputation, primarily in that the authors rely more on empirical than anecdotal evidence to support their ideas. Lest managers fear that the book is an academic exercise and not for them however, it contains many worthwhile examples based on Davies’ years of experience working with companies large and small. Academic researchers will appreciate the authors’ effort to define the corporate personality construct, develop and refine a measure of the construct, and demonstrate its relationships with important concepts such as customer and employee satisfaction and business performance. As if to ensure that readers will see reputation management as a strategic, rather than tactical function, the book begins with an overview of strategic thought and then proceeds to present reputation management as currently practiced by most firms. It is in Chapter 3 that Davies and colleagues begin to share their own ideas about reputation management. Most of the ideas they present are shared with many other writers (eg, multiple stakeholders, reputations have value and can be managed, reputations are easier to lose than to build). In the process, however, they begin to lay the foundations for their unique approach. In particular, they argue for a causal relationship between how employees view the firm (‘identity’
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