CORPORATE REPUTATION REVIEW最新文献

This study investigates how sports team reputation shapes brand equity through consumers’ relationship satisfaction, life satisfaction, and commitment. Data were collected from India in two stages, with 523 responses used to test relationships among constructs via structural equation modelling. Barring the effects of social responsibility and financial soundness on relationship satisfaction and the effect of life satisfaction on team brand equity, all hypothesised relationships were significant. Self-congruity also positively moderated relationship satisfaction outcomes, including sport-team heritage, spectator orientation, and management style dimensions. The study’s findings provide important insights for managers, highlighting the crucial role of a strong reputation in building consumer-team loyalty. Our research suggests that marketing strategies should focus on enhancing consumer self-identification by involving fans in on-field and off-field successes to foster meaningful connections.

This study addresses/examines how the conceptual structure of customer engagement in the international context has changed since its emergence. These layers of analysis will assist researchers to uncover the historical basis, and identify the changes in the knowledge structure of customer engagement research in the international business domain. Our bibliometric analysis included 151 customer engagement articles. We employed cluster visualization (VOS) along with text mining to classify the most important and informative research in customer engagement in the international context.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a popular topic among scholars and business professionals alike. While previous literature has investigated the relationship of CSR and corporate performance extensively, longitudinal research on the CSR reporting practices using a comparative approach remains limited. The current study examines CSR disclosures uncovered within annual reports of the companies representing different industries in the United States. The contribution is twofold. First, the study compared the CSR topics disclosed by the food & beverage and energy sectors and upfolded their similar patterns and different emphases. Second, the study examined the dynamics of CSR reporting practices over 8 consequent years in these industries. A mixed method approach was used in this study, combining topic modeling through the Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and complementary content analysis. The empirical analysis was conducted on the CSR disclosures from the annual reports released by six international U.S. organizations (three companies per industry sector) over the period from 2013 to 2020. The results showed that for both industries the social aspect of CSR was significantly reported. Nevertheless, the uncovered topics differed between sectors. Regarding the dynamics of CSR topics, both business sectors revealed variability of CSR aspects covered in the annual reports over the 8 years. Overall, this research sheds light on the relevance of addressing specific topics in CSR reporting as well as how to disseminate information about these topics in the annual reports.

The horn effect bias refers to the phenomenon where a negative trait influences a person's or brand's overall perception. This study examines the influence of psychological perceptions, such as perceived risk, perceived anxiety, and perceived severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, on consumer attitudes toward brands sharing similar names with the coronavirus. Specifically, three brands—Corona Extra, Modelo Especial, and Virus Vodka—with varying degrees of semantic similarity to pandemic names were selected for investigation. Our findings indicate that the consumption frequency of the selected brands did not significantly differ before and during the pandemic. Furthermore, when assessing blame attribution, participants did not hold these brands accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, no evidence was found to suggest a negative shift in perceptions of the pandemic affecting brand feelings and evaluations (i.e., attitude toward the brand).

How consumers perceive corporate social responsibility (CSR) has shifted significantly over the past decades. Initially, a voluntary commitment to solving urgent social problems, CSR was once a source of competitive advantage, specific positioning, and exclusivity in customers’ eyes. Today, however, CSR has become a fundamental prerequisite for a company to function in society, a source of company legitimacy, expected and demanded by many stakeholder groups. As research demonstrates, young people in particular loudly and intensely declare their interest in today’s challenges and vigorously demand that the companies they buy from or work for participate in CSR. On the contrary, in everyday practice, we as scholars and educators have learned that CSR is more of an empty word for consumers, something that is right but of which they have no precise idea. CSR finds itself in a paradoxical situation. Therefore, our study aims to identify the main paradoxes in how millennials perceive CSR. First, it addresses the term paradox and its contextualization within the CSR discourse. Second, the three main paradoxes (authenticity/communication, legitimacy/trust, pay-off/non-pay-off) are outlined and verified through mixed methods research. The paradoxes are identified and confirmed through the ambivalent and inconsistent responses to a questionnaire and, subsequently, multiple focus groups. Finally, implications for the CSR concept are suggested. Furthermore, this paper questions the validity of instruments traditionally used to measure consumer attitudes (not only) in the field of CSR.

Young consumers are increasingly taking on the mantle of champions for sustainable behavior. However, notwithstanding the long-established and rich debate on sustainable consumption, studies are missing that delve deeper on how young consumers, especially Millennials and Gen Z, dialogically frame their sustainable consumption choices and their favor for sustainable brands. We conduct an in-depth netnographic investigation that provides a deep cultural understanding of the motivations and priorities that young consumers associate with sustainable choices in their social media conversations, which represent the most common ground where sustainable commitments are discussed. Considering that plastic-free refillable water bottles are emerging as the daily consumption choice that young consumers are adopting to pursue a more sustainable lifestyle, we see in that a compelling research context in which the motivations that young consumers prioritize when they embrace plastic-free brands can be explored. Our findings visually map and dig deeper into the complex constellation of the dominant themes and interplays among them that young consumers discuss in their conversations about the adoption of plastic-free refillable water bottles. Across all the conversations we analyzed, the notion of care emerges as the key priority for young consumers and sustainable consumption is depicted as a holistic form of self-care. Our paper contributes to delve deeper into those conversational dynamics in and through which the priorities related to sustainable consumption choices are shaped and constructed through the expressive and material capacities of the different social formations that are engaged into the discussion of sustainability issues. Our paper also provides a methodological blueprint for the investigation of the dialogic process of sustainable brand building.

Induced by worsening environmental conditions, pursuing purpose, not solely profit, now constitutes an ethical obligation for leaders of business organisations, towards future generations. Consequently, increasing numbers of businesses seek to become purpose-led (PLBs), but challenges exist. Despite the significant growth in PLB research since the turn of the millennium, attention has mainly focussed on multinational companies, although small- and medium-sized businesses (MSBs) hugely impact any economy. This research sets out to better understand the challenges faced by leaders of companies undergoing purpose-led MSB transitioning. Thematic analysis of the interview data from founders and leaders of B-Corp certified purpose-led MSBs revealed six specific challenges consistent with literature findings, but also provided uniquely useful insights from the leaders’ perspectives. Integrated business strategies or solutions, which meet multiple challenges simultaneously, revolve around a strong corporate reputation and organisational identity driven by corporate communication. Corporate communication engages stakeholders, builds trust, reinforces reputation, and serves as a strategic intervention for differentiating purpose-led MSBs in the marketplace, shaping organisational identity. Overall, the work provides leaders of MSBs with a practical guide for navigating their challenges and developing leadership practices to enable purpose-led transformations.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is interpreted and enacted differently in developed and transition countries. These differences can present a challenge for Western multinational companies (MNCs) that operate in emerging markets, as they are faced with inconsistent norms on CSR between home and host country. Drawing on Social Identity Theory and Attribution Theory, the current research addresses how employees of MNC subsidiaries situated in emerging markets evaluate internal (which directly benefits employees) and external (which benefits other stakeholder groups) CSR practices. A survey was conducted among professionals (N = 481) working at a subsidiary of a Western MNC in Russia. Our findings revealed that internal CSR positively affected organizational identification through perceived organizational morality. Interestingly, employees’ responses to external CSR appeared to be ambivalent. Whereas external CSR had a negative direct effect on perceived organizational morality, a positive mediation effect on perceived organizational morality was found through attributed extrinsic corporate motives. This research provides much-needed contextualized insights on the psychological mechanisms underlying employees’ judgments of CSR strategies in emerging markets.

We use a mixed-methodology to examine the influence of having international family on higher education (HE) reputation and loyalty. Employing qualitative research, we hypothesize that having family members in the international country where an international student plans to pursue higher education is a key source of information that activates not only awareness and positive associations of universities but also a social identity which in turn affects HE reputation and loyalty. We test our hypotheses using survey responses from international students of a HE institution based in Alberta, Canada. Our structural equation modeling results point to the significant role of having international family—relative to marketing activities—for building HE reputation and in turn for affecting HE loyalty. Our findings contribute to the literature on organizational reputation in an international context with an enhanced understanding of the determinants of HE reputation and insights into the psychological and social processes of reputation formation. This research has also implications for university international officers and HE marketers to help with attracting international students.

The media plays a key role in bridging information asymmetries between parties such as CEOs and third-party observers. However, current research suggest that the media is not just a carrier of information but can actively shape the impression of the audience. An open question remains, hence, whether media reporting is affected by certain CEO traits such as narcissism or humility, two key constructs in the literature. For instance, narcissistic CEOs’ belief in their own superiority may spillover to the media, thereby distorting the function as information carrier and favoring directly or indirectly certain CEO traits. Therefore, by drawing on the differential effects that narcissism and humility can have on the impression of an audience, the study employs a computer-aided content analysis of factual narcissistic and humble CEOs, identified via a video metric approach, and their evaluation through three key journalistic intermediaries (New York Times, Washington Post, and Financial Times). The quantitative data suggest that actual CEO narcissism is related negatively to external performance evaluations of CEOs in subsequent years. In addition, the data suggest that narcissism as well as humility scores increase the emotional tone employed depending on the journalistic orientation of the media outlet. Humble CEOs receive on average more media attention than narcissistic CEOs yet this result is insignificant, providing limited evidence for a systematic (i.e., number of articles) bias across and within journalistic outlets towards either narcissistic or humble CEOs. This suggests that widely considered “quality” media outlets resist to portray CEO traits in an overly positive/negative light.