The breakdown of the measured companies would be necessary if the reputation and satisfaction were measured only for one specific company among the target customer group of that company. We conduct such research as well, however, this study has a very different purpose – it measures general reputation in the eyes of the whole society and public opinion leaders. We measure the MATURITY OF COMPANY’S BRAND. Companies such as Amazon, Telia or MG Baltic work in many different fields, but they also have an image that is “carried” with them as a whole organization. When doing the survey, we do not even mention the name of the company, we show only the logo so that not even text can impact the rating of the organization’s brand.

This aspect is a very important moment in this reputation study – we care not only about what customers
of the company say, but also what is the opinion of the people who are not directly connected to the
organization. Reputation studies differ from image or client satisfaction studies, because in this case
companies are evaluated not only in their competitive environment, but rather as a member of the
community: does the firm treat its workers and customers fairly, does the company engage in CSR, and
etc.

If when filling the survey, you feel that you just cannot evaluate an aspect of the company, you can always choose “difficult to say“, however, general public opinion is that intangible, but very important factor that directly influences the success of our businesses.

In this study, representativeness comes from the number of respondents that are evaluating companies included in the survey – it is important that companies are evaluated by statistically sufficient number of people. During the Lithuanian Reputation Study, we aim to ensure the minimum number of respondents from 3 target groups:

• At least 1000 members of the society (18-74 years old residents of Lithuania);
• At least 100 decision makers;
• At least 200 opinion leaders.

We further divide and assign quotas to each of the three target groups. For the society – we apply national sampling so that the respondents’ distribution based on their residence, age, education corresponds to the general distribution of residents of Lithuania. In case of decision makers and opinion leaders, we have singled out 7 sub-groups for each of these target groups and assigned a quota based on the availability of the representatives of these groups. Every respondent is checked whether she or he is correctly assigned to the target group and sub-group and then we personally invite them to participate in the survey. The survey is conducted until we reach the determined quotas of all sub-groups.

Every year, the reputation is evaluated for more than 40 companies that are operating in Lithuania. For a firm to be included in the survey list, it must be in top 20-40 based on revenues, profit, number of employees and marketing expenses. Sometimes we include smaller companies in order to compare them with the biggest ones.

However, if participants were asked to evaluate all the companies in the survey list, they would get tired, lose focus or just drop it in the middle, as the survey is done online and individually (without a direct contact from the researchers). For us, it is really important that evaluations provided by the respondents would be thought through, so we distribute the survey in laps: every participant rates 10 companies, and we look for new respondents until every company reaches the determined quota.