Corporate image

Corporate image is one of the key concepts relating to corporate-wide communication which captured the interests of scholars and practitioners since the 1950s. It denotes a personal impression of the perceived organization, and is in the eye of the beholder. A primary objective of corporate communication is argued to create the ‘intended image’ in the minds of various audiences. Although corporate images have been primarily linked to the perceptions among external audiences in the literature, locating the impressions in the minds of internal stakeholders has been acknowledged by more and more scholars as equally important. This entry compared the models addressing the formation of corporate images, including the traditional models which focused on a linear structure of images, and the new models which recognized the development of images as an ongoing negotiation process involving multiple message sources. It further provided an overview of a variety of techniques which have been used to represent corporate images in the literature. The entry ends with suggesting possible theoretical and empirical developments of this topic in the future.