NEW YORK—An analysis of 50,000 consumers has found that when positive brand equity and positive corporate reputation were combined the effects are even more positive than the individual power of each.

The analysis was published in a new paper, “A Hidden Harmony: Documenting the Connection between Brand and Corporate Reputation,” by the Council of Public Relations Firms, in conjunction with Harris Interactive.

“This has big implications for how companies are organized,” says Dave Senay (pictured), Fleishman-Hillard president and CEO and the 2013 Chair of the Council of Public Relations Firms. “Reputational considerations play a bigger role in purchase decisions than we’ve ever been able to statistically prove before, and on the flip side, brand dimensions definitely impact reputational outcomes. This shows, for the first time, the meaningful interplay between brand and reputation on a massive scale."

For marketers, these findings suggest that companies would achieve better results by adopting a new approach that takes product brand efforts and corporate reputation efforts out of their respective silos and deploys them jointly in pursuit of common objectives such as purchase consideration and recommendation.

“Given the incredibly large number of respondents we had to work with, and the number of companies and brands we could include in the analysis, the impact levels we see and the validation of the drivers unique to each industry make this valuable and important analysis,” says Robert Fronk, Harris Interactive executive vice president.

“Individual companies will need to measure and analyze their unique product brand and corporate reputation drivers to find their maximized model.”

The analysis was based on results from the 2012 Harris Poll Equitrend survey, which measures brand equity and associated attributes of over 1,000 product brands, and the 2012 Harris Poll Reputation Quotient survey, which measures the corporate reputation of nearly 100 companies.

A more detailed discussion of the analysis will take place at the Holmes Report’s first Global Public Relations Summit in Miami on Tuesday, with Fleishman-Hillard leading a panel of experts—including Fronk and Lenovo chief marketing officer David Roman—in a discussion entitled Brand and Reputation: Friends, Foes or Lovers?