WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME REGARDLESS OF MY REPUTATION? A STUDY ON THE INFLUENCE OF CORPORATE REPUTATION ON CUSTOMER BRAND PERCEPTION AND PURCHASE DECISION

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This research was conducted in order to examine the influence of corporate reputation in terms of as an employer towards both brand reputation and customer purchase decisions represented by brand perception, purchase frequency and category of items purchased. In this study, customers’ perception of the brand was also explored to identify the core blocks that form customers’ perception of the brand. The results indicate that corporate reputation did not have a strong influence on brand reputation, as customers viewed them as separate entities. Customers tended to form their brand perception based on the product features as opposed to the corporate reputation. In terms of purchase decision, the results showed that they were made and driven based on the customers’ brand perception with category of items purchased reflecting aspects of the brand perception. The study demonstrates that customers’ awareness of the corporate reputation does not affect purchase behavior, while brand perception is hardly impacted by the awareness of corporate reputation based on a survey focusing on a renowned domestic fashion-clothing retailer conducted among Japanese shoppers.

Reputation is formed from a synthesis of the perception, opinions and attitudes of an organization’s stakeholders including employees, customers and community (Post and Griffin, 1997). It basically is a perceptual representation of a company’s past actions and future prospects that describe the firm’s appeal to all of its key constituents (Fombrun, 1966). Corporate reputations and brands are important assets in enabling organizations to exploit opportunities and mitigate threats (Argenti and Druckenmiller, 2004). A favourable reputation correlates with superior overall returns (Robert and Dowling, 1997; Vergin and Qoronfleh, 1998) as it encourages investments from shareholders, attracts good staff and retains customers (Markham, 1972).

While corporate reputation is a stakeholder’s perception and evaluation of the organization over an extended period of time, corporate brands involve the organization’s efforts and initiatives in the form of corporate expression. Literature states that corporate brand comprises of two aspects: first corporate expression, which covers all mechanisms employed by the organization to express its identity and second, stakeholder images that are formed from interaction and experience with the brand (Abratt and Kleyn, 2011). Consumers judge brands based on trust that is developed from the way consumers view brand reputation, brand competence and brand constituent (Lau and Lee, 1999). The intricate relationship between reputation and brands leads to the heart of the study whether both are positively correlated, where the more positive the reputation, the stronger the brand is. In the fashion industry, labels play an important role hence among other aspects this study covers an interesting point where it looks at a fashion brand that has a fairly bad reputation and examines the extent of which the reputation is able to influence the brand perception as well as the customers’ purchase decisions.