Branding and society: the social, cultural and financial impacts of brands in the twenty-first century

Branding and society: the social, cultural and financial impacts of brands in the twenty-first century

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Product & Brand Management, Volume 19, Issue 6

About the Guest EditorsMing Lim is based at the School of Management, University of Leicester, UK.Temi Abimbola is based at the Management and Strategic Management Group, Warwick Business School, Coventry, UK.

This special issue marks the culmination of gathering of scholars and practitioners at the Academy of Marketing’s 5th International Colloquium of the ‘Brand, Corporate Identity and Reputation’ Special Interest Group (SIG), held in September 2009 at the University of Cambridge. This provides critical insights into the multiple and important interrelationships between brands and the local, national and global contexts in which they operate and thrive.

The reputation of corporate brands across diverse sectors around the world – including, of course, the financial services sector – has leapt to the forefront of public consciousness, and questions surrounding the protection and nurturance of brand image and identity in times of crisis have rarely seemed more urgent than at present. The promise that brands make to stakeholders must, therefore, be scrutinised from a broad perspective (Ind, 1998). Organisations now need to draw on the past, the present as well as the future in order to nurture their employees’, managers’ and customers’ perceptions of a corporate brand (Hatch and Schultz, 2001). Our challenge as researchers in the field is to theorise and illustrate these understandings in fresh and innovative ways in order to contribute to management practice, a task that all the papers in this issue fulfil admirably.

Tackling the issue of the financial crisis directly is the article by Reithel, Wilczynski, Schloderer and Schwaiger, An integrative approach combining cognitive as well as affective factors is adopted to examine firm reputation during challenging times. Their findings from research conducted using large-scale surveys show that the careful management of financial and non-financial components of firm reputation can greatly minimise the overall negative effects of a financial crisis upon the image of a company.

Foster, Punjaisri and Cheng address the lack of a conceptual framework to explain the synergy between internal and employer branding and how they contribute to the value(s) of a corporate brand. The recruitment of the “right people in the first place” should, the authors show, combine with the ability of employees within an organization to deliver on the brand promise. Yet, the role of “potential employees” and “potential customers” (the two groups of stakeholders may even converge, as the authors argue) is not well understood in the literature. Corporate brand values, they propose, should anchor both internal and employer branding; at the same time, both internal and employer branding should be aligned to achieve effective corporate brand management.

The importance of going back to the mythic and symbolic sources of the brand promise is highlighted in the article by Otubanjo, Abimbola and Amujo, Reminding us of the (Christian) theological wellsprings of the word “covenant”, the authors argue for important linkages to be identified between the “biblical covenant” and “corporate brand-oriented covenant”. The article provides an original and provocative conceptual map of the resonances of theological principles for contemporary understandings of the corporate brand. Based on their new definition of the corporate brand covenant, the authors undertake a semiological analysis of HSBC’s corporate advertisement to show how a theologically infused definition of the corporate brand concept reveals when and how a global brand fulfils its brand promise.

Present-day brand images are invoked through consumers’ experiences with brands through time. How past experiences of consumers shape their understanding of present corporate brand image forms the basis of the article by Rindell, Bo Advardsson and Strandvik. A historically-grounded, temporal perspective on consumers’ perceptions of the corporate brand image has been neglected in brand and consumer research and this article provides a methodological map of how to trace what the authors call the “roots” of brand image from a customer’s perspective.

From time to space: the role of architecture in building retail brand identity is the focus of the article by Kirby and Kent. Drawing upon the design process at four “superstores” that dominate the British food retailing landscape, the authors reveal the potential for building unique brand identities through distinctive store design. The design of the buildings themselves can, and does, interact with their locations (sites chosen) and the input of stakeholders to the design process to produce a powerful medium with which to communicate not just a strong visual identity but also a corporate brand.

An interesting perspective on the new role of leadership in an environmentally conscious era is taken by Hillestad, Xie and Haugland. Their article examines the role of the founder-leader in building a strong brand from a corporate social responsibility (CSR) perspective and provides important empirical support for current literature that speculates on the importance of executive leadership in creating and sustaining environmentally conscious companies.

Halonen-Knight and Hurmerinta posit that celebrity endorsements should be considered a brand alliance in which meanings and values transfer from either partner to the other. A model of reciprocal meaning transfer is proposed and the existence of a brand alliance-like relationship is established. Elements beyond credibility and attractiveness need to be included in the consideration set.

This special issue brings together temporal, spatial, theological, environmental and a rich array of conceptual perspectives on the corporate brand construct and its associations, supported by their innovative application to rich data. Practitioners were well represented at this Colloquium, and the mix of academic and managerial perspectives raised many interesting questions and generated creative thinking on what impact brands have on stakeholders in the twenty-first century. As companies increasingly seek to “go global”, what are the opportunities they need to understand for engaging synergistically (not just strategically) with their vision, promise, technological capability and people? We hope you find the answers proposed by our authors in this edition as nuanced and engaging as we have.

Ming Lim, Temi AbimbolaGuest Editors