ABSTRACT. This paper investigates under what conditions a good corporate social responsibility (CSR) can compensate for a relatively poor corporate ability (CA) (quality), and vice versa. The authors conducted an experiment among business administration students, in which information about a financial services companyÕs CA and CSR was provided. Participants indicated their preferences for the companyÕs products, stocks, and jobs. The results show that for stock and job preferences, a poor CA can be compensated by a good CSR. For product preferences, a poor CA could not be compensated by a good CSR, at least when people thought that CA is personally relevant to them. Furthermore, a poor CSR could be compensated by a good CA for product, stocks, and job preferences.

IntroductionThere is an extensive amount of practitioners' literature on corporate identity, whereas academic literature is more scarce. One of the major problems in the area of corporate identity is the lack of consensus among writers as to the basic concept of "corporate identity" (Balmer and Wilkinson, 1991). "Corporate identity" seems to be a general-purpose concept that serves as an alibi for a variety of activities like designing a new logo, interior decoration, salesforce training, all the way up to changing the corporate culture. Most authors do not define corporate identity explicitly. The only element which they appear to have in common is that "corporate identity" means "something that symbolizes the organization as a whole". Whereas it is possible to represent a whole organization by just assigning a symbol to it, symbolizing the organization becomes more difficult if information has to be communicated on what the organization is about and if a certain degree of correspondence between the symbol and the organization itself is required. Then the focus of interest changes from the symbol itself to the content of the symbol, i.e. "to what the organization is". This changed focus is equivalent to how Webster's Dictionary (1990) describes "identity": "who a person is or what a thing is".The initial purpose of this paper is to provide an outline of the prescriptive criteria for the concept of corporate identity so as to make the concept useful for corporate communication. These requirements should help ensure communication with an informative content, more than just signalling the presence of an organization. For instance, the Mercedes star itself, as a marker for Daimler Benz, stands for the Daimler Benz organization. On the other hand, it can be perceived to embody certain values when representing the organization. The second purpose of this paper is to show how such values can be found empirically in an organization, prior to management decisions to communicate something to the outside world, and prior to management decisions to improve a corporate identity deemed unsatisfactory. Role of corporate identity in corporate communicationWhenever an organization wants to communicate something about itself as a whole, it has to deal with its corporate identity. van Riel (1995) defines "corporate communication" as:

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 The goal of this study is to offer a methodology for empirically assessing the core values of an organization. It uses means-end analysis in order to determine those values that organization members manifest in their daily behaviour, and which are not just espoused 'truisms'. The method is based on the sense members of an organization make of what they do. Sensemaking follows a means-end pattern, through which individual actions converge into central values. The values most central in this means-end structure are the core values that effectively motivate organization members in their job. Our method works in two steps: first, exploratory interviews using the laddering-technique establish the values potentially most central to the organization; then, a follow-up survey assesses the complete pattern of means-end relations among the potential values. Validity tests show that the most central values derived from this survey data are the most important to organization members. These values are also the most stable over time. We make a comparison of this method with traditional value surveys and we discuss its implications for the study of organizational behaviour.

Brand managers constantly face the dilemma of adapting their brands to changing consumer taste without diluting the brand’s essence. This study presents an approach that can be used to establish which features constitute the essence of a brand, and how candidate new features would affect the perceived essence of the brand. We build on Ahn’s (1998) causal status hypothesis, which holds that the essence of concepts (e.g., brands) consists of those features perceived to cause most other features of the brand. We empirically illustrate how this approach provides important information about consumer perceptions of envisaged changes to an existing brand. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006Branding, Positioning,

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