Basic Dimensions of the Corporate ImageAuthor(s): Aaron J. SpectorSource: The Journal of Marketing, Vol. 25, No. 6 (Oct., 1961), pp. 47-51Published by: American Marketing AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1248513Accessed: 25/03/2010 10:43

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Basic Dimensions

of the Corporate Image

* AARON J. SPECTOR Studies of corporate image often proceed on the assumption that

"expert" judges know which dimensions of a corporation's image the respondents consider when they think about the corporation. This article describes a factor-analytic study in which the image dimensions were obtained empirically, and compares the images held by two groups of respondents.

NE OF THE popular tools in the mar- keting man's tool box is the concept of

the "corporate image." The concept is based on the recognition that clients buy brand products not only because of their inherent qualities but also because of a bias, a disposition toward products of selected manufacturers.

People develop attitudes toward a manu- facturer and perceive him to have certain characteristics, some of which they admire and appreciate. Others may see the same manufacturer in a different light, perceiv- ing him to have negative characteristics. In either event, the image of the manu- facturer affects people's selection or re- jection of his products. Whether sales are enhanced more by a favorable image than they are impeded by a negative image is a subject for conjecture, although there are reasonable grounds for believing the negative image to be the more potent de- terminant of consumers' choices.

James A. Bayton has pointed out that people tend to "humanize" companies, to attribute personality characteristics to them, to see them much as they do humans, in terms of being "mature," "liberal,"

* ABOUT THE AUTHOR. Dr. Spector is a Vice- President of National Analysts, Inc. He has a Ph.D. in psychology from Boston University.

Dr. Spector was formerly Head, Morale And Mo- tivation Research Branch of the Navy, and later was the Assistant Director, Personnel Measurement Re- search Department. He has done extensive research on attitudes and motives that influence behavior.

"friendly," etc.' The sum total of their perceptions of the corporation's person- ality characteristics is what we refer to as the corporate image.

Although two people may perceive the same characteristic in a given company, it does not always follow that they had the same experiences with it. For example, both may consider the company to be conserva- tive, one because of the design of its packages and the other because of the company's sales practices. The fact is that any number of diverse experiences might lead different people to the same conclusion. Furthermore, they may have opposite opinions as to whether conserva- tism is to be admired or frowned upon. Perception of a personality characteristic and evaluation of it are separate processes.

Image research must distinguish be- tween: (1) a company's image or person- ality; (2) the determinants of the image- that is, the experiences with the company which led to its being perceived as "honest" or "friendly"; and (3) the evaluation of the characteristics.

Furthermore, if a corporation is to de- rive any value from research on its image, it is necessary to measure the image in terms of meaningful characteristics that reflect the dimensions the respondents use when they evaluate the corporation's image. Factor analysis can be used to derive di- mensions of personality that underlie per-

1James A. Bayton, "Researching the Cor- porate Image," PR, Vol. 4 (October, 1959), pp. 3-8.

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JOURNAL OF MARKETING

ceptions of the corporate image, as will be shown.

DETERMINATION OF DIMENSIONS

In a report to the Advertising Research Foundation, Edgar E. Gunther described attempts by two different research firms to uncover the dimensions of personality attributed to companies.2 The two firms used essentially judgmental approaches to determine the dimensions, and arrived at different conclusions.

One firm had a panel of research execu- tives and company executives take 50 items from a check-list and regroup them into four subject areas. The other firm ex- amined every word in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and in Roget's International Thesaurus. "Words which could reason- ably be used to describe a company" were divided into synonym groups; from these, 58 "traits" were selected.

Several years earlier Charles E. Osgood and colleagues separately went through the Thesaurus and selected 289 adjective-pairs from the categories listed.3 These were regrouped, and 76 pairs were selected to represent the 289 pairs. By factor analysis performed on the University of Illinois Computer, Osgood was able to place all 76 adjectives on 8 dimensions, or factors. In other words, the 76 adjective pairs, rep- resenting all the adjective pairs in the Thesaurus, were measuring only 8 inde- pendent factors.

He performed the factor analysis because he knew that the adjectives were somewhat redundant, and were intercorrelated. They had to have some common threads or di- mensions, and he wanted to find out how many common dimensions there were. This is better explained analogously. If one were to take a ruler and make a large

2 Edgar E. Gunther, "Evaluating Corporate Image Measurements: A Review of Tech- niques," Proceedings: Advertising Research Foundation, 5th Annual Conference, (New York, 1959).

3 Reported in Charles E. Osgood, George J. Suci, and Percy H. Tannenbaum, The Meas- urement of Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957).

variety of measurements of the size of a room, a factor analysis of these measure- ments would show that basically the meas- urements were made on only three dimen- sions-height, width, and length. In other words, these three dimensions would suffice to describe a room. Our own analysis to determine how many dimensions were needed to describe a corporate image re- vealed only 6 factors to account for almost all of the measurements made.

SIX BASIC DIMENSIONS

Corporations are "humanized"; they are viewed as though they have personalities. Therefore, our basic measurements were made in terms of personality characteris- tics. The 45 characteristics used were selected from well established psychological tests of personality, and from previous im- age research data.

Each characteristic was rated on a 6- point scale, which at one end read "Not like........ (name of the corporation being rated)"-at the other end it read "Much like........ (name of the corpora- tion being rated)." The respondent circled a point somewhere along the scale. The items were intercorrelated and a Principal Components factor analysis was performed on the IBM 650. After fifteen hours the computer had produced six factors. (These were rotated according to the principles of simple structure and orthogonality, by the graphic method. There were 37 items with loadings of 40 or greater in the rotated factors.)

Taken as a composite, these 6 factors tell us more reliably and meaningfully how people perceive the corporate image than do the 45 traits taken separately. We could never get as good a picture of the corporate image by examining the items singly or in total as when we examined the responses on the 6 factors. We can place much more confidence in the reli- ability and validity of the scores on each of these factors than we can in the scores of the separate items. Each factor is in- dependent of the others, which means that we are not measuring the same thing in several different ways while thinking that

48 October, 1961

BASIC DIMENSIONS OF THE CORPORATE IMAGE

we are getting new information from each measurement.

Each factor is meaningful in that it ties together and summarizes many related evaluations. The factors are empirically derived from evaluations of the personality characteristics of a corporation and, there- fore, reflect the basic dimensions of the corporate image as seen by the respondents rather than by a panel of "experts."

An interesting thing about the factors is that the respondents were not aware that they used these dimensions in apprais- ing the corporation's image. If they were asked to name the criteria that they used in evaluating a corporation, they probably would be unable to identify them accu- rately. In a sense, they were using criteria on a somewhat subconscious level, just as most of us do when we evaluate a painting. While students of art may recognize the criteria they use in judging paintings, most of us "like" or "dislike" a painting but cannot always say why. Factor analysis

can be used to tell us what we look for in a painting or in a corporate image.

Figure 1 shows the 6 factors respondents used when they rated a corporation's image.

Dynamic

The factor which accounted for most of the variance, which dominated their image of the corporation, was dynamic. They asked themselves, "Is this corporation pio- neering?" "Does it attract attention to itself?" "Is it flexible, active, goal-oriented, etc?" Their opinions on these and similar questions can be summed up simply by asking, "Is it dynamic?" The answer to this question tells more about the corpor- ate image than does any other.

Co-operative

Second in importance is the factor we have termed co-operative. This includes such personality characteristics as being friendly, well-liked, maintains self-respect, eager to please, etc.

1~4 '

I 11 ?s0~

- F

I NE S S-W I

I It

XYZ Corporation

H A R A C T E

C c s s U

I a

FIGURE 1. The basic factors in a corporate image.

II

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JOURNAL OF MARKETING

Business-wise

Another aspect of the corporate image centers on business characteristics, includ- ing such traits as shrewd, persuasive, well- organized, etc.

Character

Most organizations jealously guard their fair name, and well they might, since an important dimension of corporate image revolves about perceptions of it as having a character that is ethical, reputable, respect- ful, etc.

Successful

Another dimension, successful, includes characteristics referring to finances, self- confidence, etc.

Withdrawn

An aloof, secretive, cautious firm would be sure to have a high withdrawn score. This is the weakest of the six factors in the image but, nevertheless, enters into the evaluation of the organization.

THE FACTORED IMAGE PROFILE

The Factored Image Profile allows us to examine both the absolute and the rela- tive strength of each of the factors in a corporation's image as it is perceived by different groups of people. For illustrative purposes, consider the image of a large manufacturer of soft goods, as it was measured.

Figure 2 shows the image of a corpora- tion as viewed by two groups of respon- dents, each having an important relation- ship to the corporation.

In both cases, the respondents viewed the company's character as its greatest strength, assigning it almost the maximum score possible. Similarly, they rated it highly on co-operative and successful.

While they differed considerably in their views of how withdrawn the company is (secretive, aloof, etc.), and to a lesser ex- tent on how dynamic it is, they agreed closely on a fairly low score for business- wise.

I It

Corporation

*IllllGroup 1

B_?ir Group 2 Z

FIGURE 2. The corporate image as seen by two groups of respondents.

October, 1961 50

BASIC DIMENSIONS OF THE CORPORATE IMAGE

Relative Importance of the Factors

Knowing that the company is strong on a given factor is not sufficient, since the strength may be on a factor that the re- spondents considered of little importance. Each factor must be evaluated in light of the importance of the factor to some stand- ard. The standard may be based on the respondents' image of an "ideal" company, or a competitive company. The standard may be the respondents' arbitrary evalua- tion of how important each factor is, or may be deduced from statements made about the company.

When the data are factor analyzed, the factors can be assigned to rank-order posi- tions according to the amount they con- tributed to the total variance. In the present study, the first ranked factor was more important in the corporate image than the second ranked factor, etc. In other words, their over-all image was more influenced by the characteristics which are described by the first factor than by char- acteristics in other factors.

To illustrate how this information is used, Table 1 shows the factors (of Group 1) ranked according to the size of scores, and according to their importance in the image.

Supplementary Data

Additional information about the cor- poration's image was obtained by asking the respondents to indicate where they felt that change is needed. In their opinion, the company should be more dynamic and less withdrawn; they feel it needs little improvement on character. Similar infor- mation was obtained on the "ideal" com- pany and on competitive companies. All these data are pertinent to decisions about changes that should be made in the cor- porate image.

Although the organization appeared to be vulnerable on dynamic, there was room for optimism as shown by the responses made to other questions. Respondents in- dicated a recognition of the fact that the company was in a state of transition, changing from a staid, conservative organi- zation to a much more aggressive, rapid- moving firm. They said that it was "on the

TABLE 1 IMAGE SCORES RANKED ACCORDING TO

STRENGTH AND IMPORTANCE (By Group 1)

Rank by strength

1. Character 2. Co-operative 3. Successful 4. Withdrawn 5. Dynamic 6. Business-wise

Rank by importance

1. Dynamic 2. Co-operative 3. Business-wise 4. Character 5. Successful 6. Withdrawn

go," "flexible," "alive," etc. Despite their awareness of the company's recent actions, they still considered it to be weak on the dynamic factor. Why? Perhaps this seem- ing anomaly is mute testimony to the fact that attitudes are tenaciously held, even in the face of evidence opposing them.

An image held by the people who inter- act with the company is not easily nor quickly improved, since the image assumes the nature of an attitude, and the latter have emotional components resistant to change. Attempts to induce changes in the image must take account of the emotions, must deal with the emotions on their own level, not with a straightforward presentation of facts. The corporate image seemed to be entrenched in the respondents' minds, and it would take time and continued effort to change it. Nevertheless, the image is definitely changing, slowly perhaps.

IMPLICATIONS The image profile discussed is illustrative

of one company only. When we studied a company in another industrial category, the same factors were ranked quite differently in terms of their importance in the image. Further research with the Factored Image Profile should result in the development of profiles showing the importance of each fac- tor for each industrial category.

An attempt has been made to demon- strate the utility and economy of describ- ing the corporate image on the same di- mensions that people perceive the image. Each of the 6 dimensions is complex, in- corporating evaluations of many experi- ences and observations. The dimensions derived from the factor analysis appear to be meaningful perceptual units for the study of a corporate image.

51