Corporate reputations in different service industries - results of an empirical study in Germany

Common international approaches of measuring corporate reputation, like for example the RQ of the Reputation Institute, New York, are based on standardized measurement concepts. This paper justifies the suspicion that it makes sense to develop and test sector-specific measuring concepts of corporate reputation within individual countries. The focus of the data evaluation was confirmatory factor analyses or so-called covariance structure analyses, with whose help the subjective psychology of those questioned, can be transferred to a measurement model. This paper, which provides interesting insight both for corporate practice as well as for further academic research, essentially pursued three objectives: 1) construction of a suitable instrument for measuring reputation in the three sectors. In this connection, we primarily look into the question of whether a uniform reputation measurement for all sectors or whether differentiated measurement approaches lead to more valid results; 2) determination of the reputation positions of the companies and the sectors; and 3) measurement of earnings efficiency, that is answering the question of whether reputation affects earnings-oriented target parameters and which differences or similarities exist between the individual sectors.