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1. Introduction
Corporate reputation is a highly popular multidisciplinary research area examined by various disciplines including accountancy, economics, marketing, organizational behavior, sociology and strategy (Fombrun and van Riel, 1997). Indeed, the concept of corporate reputation has attracted widespread attention throughout the world (Groenland, 2002), since it provides sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace by means of being a rare, inimitable and valuable soft asset (Boyd et al., 2010; Keh and Xie, 2009) and makes great contributions to the profitability of firms (Gardberg and Fombrun, 2002; Gotsi and Wilson, 2001; Whetten and Mackey, 2002; Yoon et al., 1993).
Some researchers conceptualize corporate reputation as an aggregate evaluation of both internal and external stakeholders. As such, they measure corporate reputation by utilizing generic measurement tools which can be used across all stakeholder groups (e.g. Fombrun et al., 2000; Davies et al., 2001, 2004). However, Mahon (2002) and Walker (2010) point out that the reputation of a firm might differentiate relying on the considered contexts, issues and stakeholders. Additionally, Wartick (2002) stated that each different stakeholder group might hold different assessments toward the corporate reputation of the firm with a different set of attributes. In other words, since the reputation is an issue and a stakeholder-specific phenomenon, different stakeholder groups may have different evaluations of corporate reputation and each stakeholder group’s reputation may have different dimensions. Therefore, it is possible to argue that dimensions of corporate reputation might vary among different industries and stakeholder groups and so should be measured in terms of a single industry and stakeholder group. In fact, there are some studies, which demonstrate that different stakeholder groups may have a different reputation perception or underlying reputation dimensions may have different importance for each stakeholder group (e.g. Helm, 2005, 2007; Puncheva-Michelotti and Michelotti, 2010). Therefore, there are numerous views related to which stakeholder groups should be considered when corporate reputation is being examined. Employee-based reputation, public-based reputation, investor-based reputation and customer-based reputation appear in these different views (Shamma, 2012, p. 159). Still, there is little empirical research on measuring corporate reputation by focusing on customers which are the most important stakeholder group of a firm (Walsh, Beatty and Shiu, 2009, p. 924; Walsh, Mitchell, Jackson and Beatty, 2009). Actually, the first...