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ABSTRACT
E-retailers or e-businesses generally represent a special case of corporate branding. As with most aspects of e-commerce, very little is known about the sources or drivers of successful e-- brands. Why are some e-brands better than other e-brands? At the same time, e-brands are a particularly useful way of studying corporate brands because the 'entire' corporation appears on a screen in front of you. Not only is the entire organization encapsulated on a single screen, the reputation of that corporation is very sensitive to the way the company is portrayed. A message of `site under construction' quickly damages corporate reputation. The paper develops a framework based on statistical structural modeling of a convenience sample of CD users. The focus of the model is the brand attitude of the user towards the e-retailer. Critical drivers of corporate brand attitude are highlighted and shown to be e-interactivity and e-trust. It is suggested that companies striving to build corporate reputations on business to consumer Web relationships need to place priority on developing capabilities that enhance e-interactivity and e-- trust.
INTRODUCTION
The management of a corporate brand is intimately tied to the management of an organization's identity as viewed by internal stakeholders, its image as viewed by external stakeholders, and finally its reputation as perceived by all stakeholders (Davies et al., 2001). As Abratt (1989) and Ind (1997) both argue, corporate brand identity is developed within an organization. This identity is then projected to various stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, bankers and other influential groups, through a combination of marketing communications as well as the delivery of goods and services. As a result of receiving communication messages, together with experiencing the nature and quality of the goods and services purchased, the audience forms an image of the organization by evaluating its' credibility, honesty and expertise. Thus, corporate brand image is essentially a perception held by stakeholders based on their experiences with an organization (Gold-- smith et al., 2000).
In this way, corporate credibility plays a key role in influencing consumer reactions to the organizations' communications, both internal within the organization and external via consumer reactions to advertisements and brands. Thus, the notion of corporate brand image is intimately connected with that of corporate reputation. Dowling (1994)...