Online reviews enable brands to promote their products by means of word-of-mouth communication. In an e-commerce environment, user-generated customer feedback, as a form of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), is a crucial source of information in the prepurchase stage as many customers base their purchase decision on feedback from other customers. eWOM is perceived as a reliable source of information and has become especially important in an online environment (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006; Li & Zhan, 2011). Existing research has shown that customer feedback positively influences sales (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006; Forman, Ghose, & Wiesenfeld, 2008; Ha, Bae, & Son, 2015). Yet, only very limited research on how to communicate customer feedback to maximize a company’s top-line growth has been conducted (Packard & Berger, 2017). In this study, we aim to fill this gap by investigating how numerical customer feedback metrics should be communicated to attract new customers. Using an experiment, we empirically investigate which of the two widely established numerical customer feedback metrics, a customer recommendation rate or a customer satisfaction rate, is better suited to attract new customers and hence stimulate company growth. The impact of the stimulus on the purchase process is measured by means of three different dependent variables to imitate the hierarchy of a purchase decision: consumers’ interest towards the ad, their attitude towards the product shown in the ad as well as their purchase intention. Furthermore, we include several moderating factors, which have proven to be relevant when looking at online reviews, namely product type as well as consumers’ motivation and ability to process persuasive communication (Gupta & Harris, 2010; Klein, 1998; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

Corporate reputation – the central antecedent of trust – bears the potential to create sustainable competitive advantage. However, far too many examples of companies’ socially irresponsible behavior over the past years led to a severe crisis of confidence. Disgraced companies suffer from the adverse effects of their misbehaviors at all levels. As a consequence, one of the top priorities for both practitioners and business scholars is the identification of opportunities to (re)build corporate reputation. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a key driver of reputation perceptions, is a very promising one. However, as CSR is a multidimensional construct that comprises a wide range of activities, the selection of the “right” ones deems a major challenge. Based on a literature review, we advocate that news media data should be utilized to analyze which CSR dimensions are particularly likely to affect reputation perceptions. As journalists rely on companies’ press releases as a starting point for their business articles, companies need to carefully evaluate which CSR dimensions they emphasize in their communication strategy. Based on superior measures of reputation and CSR, this study utilizes reputation and news media coverage data on companies listed in the German DAX30 between 2005 and 2011. The panel data regression encompasses the multidimensional concept of CSR, presenting a six-dimensional CSR construct including environment, employee relations, community, product issues, corporate culture and corporate governance. Relevant moderating variables, namely firm and stakeholder characteristics, are investigated. In this context, the results show that the relevance of each of those six distinct dimensions differs for the formation of reputation judgements and varies across investigated stakeholder and company types: across all model specifications, negative media coverage addressing employee relations and community affects reputation perceptions. The general public primarily perceives negative news coverage as relevant for their reputation judgements. Opinion leaders seem to be less dependent on the media to learn about CSR dimensions, as only four out of twelve independent variables exert a significant impact on their reputation judgments. News coverage about product issues only constitutes a key role in the formation of reputation judgements of firms that are predominantly known from direct experiences. A particularly large amount of variation can be explained for reputation ratings of these companies as well as for reputation perceptions of opinion leaders.