This document discusses how corporate associations with consumers can influence product responses and discusses two types of associations - corporate ability (CA) associations relating to a company's products/services, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) associations relating to ethical/social behaviors. It indicates that prior research on these associations has been inconsistent. It then presents analysis showing that while two companies may have the same overall favorability, their different CA and CSR associations could result in different consumer product responses. Factor analysis resulted in CA and CSR loading on separate factors, and CA associations appeared more influential on brands than CSR associations based on a simplified model.

1. Marketing
• The inconsistent results in the literature leave marketing
• managers with the intuitive implication that a good image
is
• probably better than a bad image, but with little else to
guide
• them as to how particular corporate positioning strategies
• might influence consumer product responses.

2. Analysis
• I believe
• that one of the reasons for the inconsistency of prior
results
• is that not all corporate associations are alike. Two
companies
• may have the same overall degree of favorability for
• consumers, yet each company might experience different
• influences of corporate associations on consumer product
• responses.

3. next• I believe that to understand these different
• effects it is important to distinguish between two types of
• associations-CA associations and CSR associations.
The factor analysis with
• varimax rotation resulted in two factors. Consistent with
• our expectations, measures of CA associations loaded high
• on the first factor and low on the second factor, and measures
• of CSR associations loaded high on the second factor
• and low on the first factor. We maintained the orthogonality
• of these scores and used the scores associated with the estimates for
the overall model The standardized path coefficients also suggest
• that CA associations are more influential at the brand level
• than are CSR associations, at least in this simplified model.