Recently, the crisis in the over-the-air broadcast has been often brought up by the TV industry and the academia. In addition to the aspect of broadcasting business management, the crises in the identity and the ethic around the TV industry have been ...
Recently, the crisis in the over-the-air broadcast has been often brought up by the TV industry and the academia. In addition to the aspect of broadcasting business management, the crises in the identity and the ethic around the TV industry have been noticed. With those problems in consideration, it is necessary to speculate how the customers have perceived the industry and how we need to improve the perception.
In terms of corporation communication, which deals with the relationships among corporate identity, image, and reputation, this research aims to assess how a broadcast corporation has been perceived by the insider and the outsider of the corporation. Corporate image refers to the picture, which individuals draw in perceiving a corporation; corporate identity refers to the picture, which a corporation want to draw for the customer's head. And, corporate reputation means the evaluation and the judgment by the interest circles through their long time experience of a corporation. These three concepts, corporate identity, image, and reputation, are the fundamental elements, which constitute corporate communication processes. Based on these concepts, many scholars have built the model of corporate communication.
Among the research on corporate communication, corporate identity and corporate image interface are the most noticeable concepts. Corporate image interface refers to the point of contact with customers in the management process of corporate identity and image. And, this is the gap between the two images possessed by a corporation and the outsiders. Therefore, a corporate reputation takes place by the gap formed by the degree of agreement - the interface.
However, there has been little empirical research on the relationships among corporate identity, image, and reputation except for modeling and theorizing the phenomena. Hence, this research pursues to go further the discussion about the measurement of the concepts beyond a theoretical discussion on them. For this, the broadcasting corporations, such as KBS, MBC, and SBS, will be investigated as the research target.
Corporate identity, or image interface, can be identified the extent of agreement or gap between a corporate identity, which is created by business philosophy, ideology, products, services, activities, corporate symbol, etc., and a corporate image from the customers' perceptions. This study have incorporated coorientational theory into it to build a coorientational model of corporate identity and image interface. In particular, this research has classified the four types of coorientation status, based on the difference in perception between the corporation employees and the customers, which has employed the concept of third person's opinion inference.
Research Question 1. What are the corporate identity, image, and interfaces across the broadcasting corporations?
Research Question 2. Whether the employees' corporate image inference mediates or moderate the relationships between corporate identity and corporate reputation?
This research has conducted an Internet survey for the outsider customers through an Internet opinion research institution, which had a sample of 303. Quota sampling method was employed for the sampling, which had the population composed of Seoul residents in the age between 20 and 50. Then, 150 hard-copies of survey has been randomly distributed to each broadcasting company; as a result, 98 has been collected from KBS, 86 from MBC, and 75 from SBS.
As a research result, the employees of all three broadcasting companies have high corporate identity and reputation, but the outsider customers have relatively low corporate image. On the other hand, the outsider customers have different corporate reputations for each companies. That is, KBS has the highest reputation, MBC's reputation follows KBS, and SBS has the lowest reputation. In terms of corporate image, there is no difference between KBS and MBC, and SBS has a relatively low corporate image. This outcome shows that SBS has been still perceived as a commercial broadcasting even though it has oriented toward a public broadcasting.
Then, this research has assessed the coorientation status through the objective degree of agreement interface between corporate identity and image and the subjective degree of agreement interface between corporate identity and the outsider corporate image inference interface (RQ 1). Consequently, the three broadcasting corporations in general have negative understanding status in terms of coorientation status; however, there were diverse and specific aspects across the sub 6 factors in corporate identity.
Then, this research has inquired into whether the employees' corporate image inference mediates or moderate the relationships between corporate identity and corporate reputation (RQ 2). For this, this research has set up the 6 stages of verifying the mediate effect and tested it through structural equation model. As a result, the expected paths were significant; Sobel test verified the significance of the paths. Accordingly, the employees' corporate image inference is likely to mediate the relationships between corporate identity and corporate reputation. Yet, the employees' corporate image inference is not likely to moderate the relationships between corporate identity and corporate reputation.