| Summary: | Thesis (M.M. (Strategic Marketing))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Graduate School of Business Administration, 2015. === Over the last decade the concept of corporate reputation has received extensive coverage from numerous angles with a growing body of publications, specialist agencies, conferences, workshops, guidelines and awards on this topic emerging from all over the world. In recent years The King Report on Governance for South Africa 2009 and the King Codes of Governance Principles (King III) mandated South African companies’ boards to acknowledge and appreciate that stakeholders’ perceptions affect a company’s reputation. As a result of the reputation phenomenon various company reputation rankings are published every year, based on an overall perceptual measure of corporate reputation.
However, corporate reputation management is still an immature discipline in South Africa and a recent study confirmed that although South African directors acknowledge that a good corporate reputation is valuable to any organisation, they hold very different views as to whether a good reputation really offers a competitive advantage; as well as the actual dimensions that constitute corporate reputation (Reddiar, Kleyn & Abratt, 2012). The objective of this research was therefore to investigate whether a relationship exists between said reputation rankings and the extent to which South African organisations have formal reputation management programmes in place.
To enhance the probability of arriving at a comprehensive understanding of the research problem in question, a mixed methods research methodology was chosen and the data collection was done in 2 phases. Phase 1 included a cross-sectional electronic survey questionnaire, and phase 2 consisted of a cross-sectional content analysis done on all survey questionnaire respondent organisations’ latest integrated annual reports.
The study found evidence that partially supports the research problem statement in that there is a relationship between reputation rankings and having formal reputation programmes in place for the sample group. Based on the finding that only between 60-70% of the respondent organisations indeed have extensive formal reputation management programmes in place, it was concluded that corporate South Africa is in need of an academic model to use for the effective implementation of corporate reputation management. Ultimately, this study has yielded such a model.
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