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Introduction
Many organisations spend time, resources and effort to build a strong image for their businesses. Millions are spent on advertising their products and services to create a strong, impressive brand and donations and charity events are sponsored in order to create an image of a socially responsible organisation in the eyes of the public. Employees are trained in corporate dressing and image marketing while research firms help organisations to determine consumer preferences and opinions of the firms and their products. In response to these observations, this article aims to reiterate the importance of corporate image, analyse the factors that affect it, and recommend ways for business organisations to enhance their corporate image.
What is Corporate Image?
Corporate image is often used interchangeably with either public image or organisation image and may be defined in the following ways:
1. Sum total of its reputation, the way it organises and operates its activities and how it conducts its business; and the attitudes of its employees and how they respond to customers and associates.
(Business Etiquette, Vicky's Professional Image Consultant)
2. Function of organisational signals that determine the perception of various stakeholders regarding the actions of an organisation.
(Corporate Image: Employee Reactions and Implications for Managing Corporate Social Performance, Journal ofBusiness Ethics, Issue 16, 1997)
3. Image that a company has acquired with the public. (The Image ofa Company: Manual for Corporate Identity, Architecture Design and Technology Press)
4. Composite of the perceptions and attitudes of the internal and external public of a corporation. Internal publics include managers, employees and investors. External publics include the community, consumers government and the media.
(Managing the Corporate Image: The Key to Public Trust, James G. Gray. Jr.)
This article defines corporate image as the stakeholders' perception ofthe actions, activities, and accomplishments of an organisation. Each class of stakeholder relates differently to the organisation and, thus, has a different perception of the organisation.
Each class of stakeholder has its own expectation of the organisation, as shown in Table 1.
Literature Review
In today's competitive environment, many companies need to project a strong and positive reputation to their stakeholders, namely the employees, consumers, investors and the public. This is made more difficult as each of the stakeholders relate differently to the company....