Extending the Corporate Reputation Paradigm: Commensurable Operationalization and Measurement

The existing literature on corporate reputation (CR) suffers from substantive divergence between the studies in terms of defining the construct’s domain, dimensional structure, and the methodological operationalization. The current study aims to integrate varying theoretical perspectives and build on the corporate reputation’s landscape by proposing a holistic but parsimonious triadic reconceptualization of the construct for customer-specific stakeholders. Customer-based CR is presented as a superordinate construct (generalized favorability) affecting three distinct first-order dimensions (cognitive evaluations of corporate reputation): product & service efficacy, market prominence, and societal ethicality. Further, relying on several commonly used corporate reputation measures, the current paper suggests a parsimonious triadic short customer-based corporate reputation scale (CR-3) that spans the breadth of the construct. Results show that the proposed triadic conceptualization and operationalization are ...