Impact of customer-based corporate reputation on non-monetary and monetary outcomes: the roles of commitment and service context risk

A firm's reputation is an important intangible asset, because of its potential for value creation. The authors explore non-monetary and monetary outcomes of customer-based corporate reputation (CBR) and hypothesize that commitment serves as a partial mediator, while service context risk is a moderator, of these relationships. Using a large sample of service customers who evaluated the reputation of service firms in four service categories, the results show that (1) commitment partially mediates the relationship between CBR and most of the outcome variables, and (2) service provider selection risk moderates these relationships, such that reputation has a stronger effect on several non-monetary outcomes for higher-risk services and commitment has a stronger effect for lower-risk services, consistent with a dual-processing framework explanation. The authors discuss the theoretical and managerial implications.