Two reputation studies released this week both show a marked gap between banks' reputations with their own customers and their reputations in the broader community. According to one new study - the Bank Reputation Index - ANZ, Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank enjoy a much higher reputation with the market generally than they do with their own customers.For Bank of Queensland, Bendigo & Adelaide Bank and ME Bank the reverse is true - their standing with their own customers is much higher than their overall reputation in the market.The Bank Reputation Index was prepared jointly by researcher East & Partners and a public relations firm, Daymark, and was based on a survey of 1300 businesses.Daymark director Richard Peters said those banks whose customer ratings outranked their overall reputation had an opportunity to grow market share if they could get their branding right.For the others, there was considerable risk in the fact that customers had a less favourable impression than the general community. Citibank, Westpac, Bankwest, HSBC and St George had a close alignment of customer and overall reputation scores.Meanwhile, a new Roy Morgan Research reputation survey, conducted between April and September, also showed disparities between customer and non-customer responses.Roy Morgan found that 65.9 per cent of ANZ's business customers rate its reputation as good or very good - the highest ratings in the survey - while only 42.0 per cent of non-customers rate it as good or very good. Ten per cent of customers rate the bank's reputation as poor or very poor, while 15.1 per cent of non-customers rate it as poor or very poor.CBA has a big problem with non-customers according to Roy Morgan; 23.5 per cent of them rate its reputation as poor or very poor. National Australia Bank is not far behind, with 22.3 per cent of non-customers rating it as poor or very poor.One of the findings of the Daymark/East survey is that the millions of dollars banks spend each year on sponsorships, community support and other social responsibility programs have little impact on business customers when it comes to assessing reputation.Peters said: "Overall, social responsibility was not seen as having either a positive or negative effect on reputation."An issue that does have an impact is chief executive salary. Most respondents said CEO income had a "very strong" impact on reputation. The most critical responses came from customers of the big banks.