Invariance of the Reputation Emotional Index RepTrak Pulse: A Study Validation on Generational Change

Reputation takes on special relevance for companies and organizations at a time when the traditional model of short-term capitalism is being redefined and focused on moving from short term to the creation of long-term value and creating value for all stakeholders. This approach requires demonstrating with metrics the benefits that long-term creation produces and precisely, a key performance indicator (KPI) that addresses this need of demonstrating empirically the long-term value is reputation. Nowadays, the rising value of company-intangible assets and resources such as reputation has increased academic interest in the methodological properties of such metrics which are being object of monitoring and management. One of these properties is the invariance of the metric between the different demographic groups composing the population. The invariance of the corporate intangible metrics is an essential requirement for a correct interpretation of reputation results surveys, especially in those indices such as RepTrak Pulse that measure overall reputation on a broad demographic spectrum. The populational invariance guarantees that individual RepTrak Pulse scores might be aggregated to other population samples because everyone is expressing the same underlying feeling. The classic tests about reliability and validity of the RepTrak Pulse metric do not deal with this issue and therefore, the invariance analysis becomes a complementary and necessary test that allows legitimately to make use Pulse scores at populational level. In 2011, Ponzi, Fombrun and Gardberg demonstrated that the RepTrak Pulse was valid and reliable in several countries. However, they did not verify the population invariance of this metric. Four years later, this deficiency was corrected, demonstrating the invariance of the Reptrak Pulse by sex, age, and educational level by Alloza (2015). The populational invariance guarantees that Pulse scores variations reflect real feeling changes and not changes due to variations in the demographic composition of survey samples. Our current research aims to reinforce the robustness of RepTrak Pulse index by checking the degree of invariance with respect to a variable that often goes unnoticed in the Pulse follow-up, namely case of the generational group. The generational effect should not be confused with that of age, even though they are related. Generations imply specific ways of understanding and reacting to the world that could interact the notion of Pulse shared by each generational group and could invalidate the temporal comparison. Thus, here we examine the degree of invariance that Reptrak Pulse has by generation. To separate the effect between generation and age the “time-lag method” was applied to the invariance analysis in two cross-sectional samples (in 2006 and 2017). Data proceeding from 9000 interviews were analyzed in Spain, France, Germany, Canada, Brazil and Japan. Our results show that RepTrak Pulse is invariant by generation; thus, generational changeover does not interfere with the interpretation of the temporal trajectory of this overall reputation construct.