One hundred and seventy‐nine heads of sales or direct marketing departments in large UK companies across five industry sectors completed mail questionnaires concerning the knowledge management (KM) practices employed by their firms. The extents of the KM systems operating within sample enterprises were analysed with respect to each company’s use of teamwork, level of bureaucracy and centralisation of decision making, innovativeness, and ability to cope with change. Respondents’ views on the contributions of KM to marketing management were also examined.

Relationships between a supplier's corporate reputation, trust in the supplier, co-operation, buyer commitment, and willingness to undertake relationship-specific investments were examined in the context of interactions between three UK seaports and a sample of 144 of their customer shipping firms. It emerged that the model proposed by the International Marketing and Purchasing Group performed well as a predictor of supplier/purchaser relationships within this sector. Seaports' corporate reputations (as measured by the Fortune reputation index) significantly affected shippers' desires for close relationships with particular ports, and acted as a quasi-moderator of the impact of supplier trust on closeness. Reputation, moreover, constituted a pure moderator vis-aÁ -vis the influences of trust on commitment and on relationship-specific investments and adaptations of business systems. Additionally reputation modified the effects of experience (i.e. the period for which a shipper had been doing business with a specific port) on trust.

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Article information:To cite this document: Roger BennettHelen Gabriel, (2001),"Corporate reputation, trait covariation and the averaging principle -The case of the UK pensions mis-selling scandal", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 35 Iss 3/4 pp. 387 -413 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.Abstract Presents the results of an empirical investigation into whether the attribution by members of the public of an unfavourable reputational trait (e.g. dishonesty) to a company covaries with other traits ascribed to the same enterprise. Additionally it examines whether people aggregate successive pieces of unfavourable information received about a business to form a continuously worsening impression of it; or whether they mentally average bad news, so that successive adverse items can actually improve the overall impression ± provided the later messages are not as damaging as the earlier ones. The study is based on the UK pensions misselling scandal, which generated severe, long-term media criticism of the large UK insurance companies. Hence it analyses a unique reputational management situation in that the firms involved are subject to continuous and intense scrutiny, protracted and hostile media coverage, periodic public censure by regulatory authorities, and interference in day-to-day management by government agencies. The proposition that pensions are an``avoidance product'' is also explored.The research register for this journal is available at