The Routledge Companion to Corporate Branding

Oriol Iglesias, Nicholas Ind, Majken Schultz, Oriol Iglesias, Nicholas Ind, Majken Schultz

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000573602
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Marketing

This companion is a prestige reference work that offers students and researchers a comprehensive overview of the emerging co-created, multi-stakeholder, and sustainable approach to corporate brand management, representing a paradigm shift in the literature.

The volume contains 30 chapters, organised into 6 thematic sections. The first section is an introductory one, which underscores the evolution of brand management thinking over time, presenting the corporate brand management field, introducing the current debates in the literature, and discussing the key dimensions of the emerging corporate brand management paradigm. The next five sections focus in turn on one of the key dimensions that characterize the emerging approach to corporate brand management: co-creation, sustainability, polysemic corporate narratives, transformation (history and future) and corporate culture. Every chapter provides a deep reflection on current knowledge, highlighting the most relevant debates and tensions, and offers a roadmap for future research avenues. The final chapter of each section is a commentary on the section, written by a senior leading scholar in the corporate brand management field.

This wide-ranging reference work is primarily for students, scholars, and researchers in management, marketing, and brand management, offering a single repository on the current state of knowledge, current debates, and relevant literature. Written by an international selection of leading authors from the USA, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, it provides a balanced, authoritative overview of the field and convenient access to an emerging perspective on corporate brand management.

F Branding inside-out

Corporate culture and internal branding

26 BRANDING INSIDE-OUT

Development of the internal branding concept

DOI: 10.4324/9781003035749-32

Rico Piehler

1. Introduction

Internal stakeholders such as employees are either directly or indirectly responsible for delivering the externally communicated brand promise and are thus crucial to building and maintaining strong brands. Because they are key sources of sustainable differentiation and competitive advantages, they represent an important target group of corporate branding efforts. Consequently, internal branding has developed as a management concept that focuses on the internal perspective of branding. As a relatively young concept, it has gained widespread acceptance in mainstream branding literature over the past 20 years. Until the millennium, branding techniques and approaches applied mainly to external stakeholders, such as customers. Only with the rise of modern marketing and management concepts and theories, did the internal perspective of branding gain momentum through internal branding. This chapter briefly introduces the history of the concept by highlighting noteworthy contributions to developing the field. In addition to presenting the conceptual bases from different disciplines and integrating various definitions to create a shared understanding, this chapter also presents the elements (dimensions) of internal branding that have been investigated in internal branding literature. It concludes with future developments and directions for further research of the concept.

2. A brief history of internal branding

As with the emergence of the related concept of employer branding, which represents the application of branding principles to human resources management (Ambler & Barrow, 1996; Foster et al., 2010; Moroko & Uncles, 2008), the field of internal branding was not initially characterised by academics advancing the idea that employees are an essential target group of brand management. Practitioners mostly drove early internal branding literature with their book publications (Ind, 2001), as well as their publications in academic (Bergstrom et al., 2002; Ind, 2003) and practitioner-focused (Mellor, 1999; Mitchell, 2002; Zucker, 2002) journals. Following this stage, academics began to advance the field by defining and developing the internal branding concept. In addition to producing individual papers that shaped the development of the concept (Table 26.1), several clusters of academics from different regions of the world emerged, publishing a series of academic papers. These distinct research clusters made noteworthy contributions to developing the field of internal branding.

Table 26.1 Internal branding publications outside the identified research groups

Author(s)	Contribution(s)
Aurand et al. (2005)	Discussion of human resource management's role in internal branding
Chong (2007)	Case study on how internal communication and training enable a company to deliver on its brand promise consistently
Mahnert and Torres (2007)	Identification of 25 key factors of failure and success in internal branding and introduction of a consolidated internal branding framework
Kimpakorn and Tocquer (2009)	Investigation of the effect of the employer brand dimensions on employees’ brand commitment
Baumgarth and Schmidt (2010)	Introduction of internal brand equity and examination of its relationship with company-level and individual-level determinants and customer-based brand equity as a consequence
Hughes and Ahearne (2010)	Investigation of the impact of two types of salesperson identification and manager control system alignment on brand extra-role behaviours and (brand) performance
Raj Devasagayam et al. (2010)	Integration of the research streams of brand community and internal branding to investigate the viability of intraorganizational brand communities in internal branding
Chang et al. (2012)	Introduction of brand psychological ownership into internal branding and examination of organizational-level antecedents, individual-level and organizational-level outcomes and customer outcomes
Sharma and Kamalanabhan (2012)	Examination of the internal corporate communication (ICC) process and its effect on internal branding objectives
Sirianni et al. (2013)	Investigation of the effect of employee — brand alignment of frontline service employees on overall brand evaluations and customer-based brand equity as customer responses
Matanda and Ndubisi (2013)	Examination of the moderating role of goal congruence on the effects of internal branding and internal customer orientation on person-organization fit
Gelb and Rangarajan (2014)	Examination of employees’ contributions to brand equity
Lohndorf and Diamantopoulos (2014)	Study of the mediating role of organizational identification on the effects of employee-brand fit, brand knowledge, and belief in the brand on employee brand-building behaviours
Du Preez and Bendixen (2015)	Examination of the effect of internal brand management on job satisfaction, brand commitment, and intention to stay
Erkmen and Hancer (2015)	Investigation of the effect of employees’ brand citizenship behaviours on customers’ evaluation of brand performance, brand trust, and brand commitment
Helm et al. (2016)	Study of the effect of brand self-congruity on employees’ brand identification, brand pride, and brand-related behaviour
Kaufmann et al. (2016)	Development of a conceptual model for the effect of behavioural branding on customers’ brand love and co-creation
Terglav et al. (2016)	Investigation of the mediating effect of employee brand knowledge, employee-brand fit, and psychological contract fulfilment on the relationship between brand-oriented leadership and brand commitment
Du Preez et al. (2017)	Analysis of the effect of internal brand management on brand citizenship behaviour and intention to stay through job satisfaction and brand commitment
Liu et al. (2017)	Examination of the processes whereby brand orientation affects in- and extra-role employee brand-building behaviour from the perspective of the attention-based view
Anees-ur-Rehman et al. (2018)	Investigation of the relationship between brand orientation and financial performance through internal branding, brand communication, brand awareness, and brand credibility
Dechawatanapaisal (2018)	Examination of the relationships among internal branding, brand orientation, brand identification, brand commitment, and employees’ intention to stay
Garas et al. (2018)	Analysis of the relationship between internal branding and employees’ brand supporting in-role and extra-role behaviour, mediated by employees’ role clarity, affective commitment, and continuance commitment
Iyer et al. (2018)	Investigation of the relationships between brand orientation, strategic branding, internal branding, and brand performance
Schmidt and Baumgarth (2018)	Identification of success factors of brand ambassador programs
Ngo et al. (2019)	Introduction of a cognitive-affective-behaviour model of internal branding proposing that internal brand knowledge triggers employee brand identification that influences brand- and customer-focused behaviours, which in turn foster employee performance
Boukis and Christodoulides (2020)	Development of a model of antecedents and consequences of employee-based brand equity (EBBE) via brand knowledge and brand identification
Iglesias and Ind (2020)	Holistic integration of the co-creation perspective into corporate brand management with multiple stakeholders helping to build and enrich the corporate brand

The first three clusters come from the United Kingdom and the United States. Leslie de Chernatony and colleagues were among the first academics to bring attention to internal branding issues. Their publications deal with internal branding objectives (Thomson et al., 1999) and internal branding activities (Harris & de Chernatony, 2001; Vallaster & de Chernatony, 2005, 2006), particularly in the services branding context. The second research cluster from the United Kingdom formed around Khanyapuss Punjaisri, Alan Wilson, and Heiner Evanschitzky. This cluster developed a holistic internal branding model, comprising internal branding objectives, activities and moderators, and validated it empirically (Punjaisri & Wilson, 2007, 2011). Another cluster originates in the United States with Sandra Jeanquart Miles and W. Glynn Mangold conceptualizing and empirically examining the employee branding process (Miles et al., 2011; Miles & Mangold, 2004).

Two more clusters of internal branding researchers emerged in Germany and Switzerland. Together with their colleagues, Christoph Burmann, Sabrina Zeplin, and Rico Piehler introduced a holistic internal branding model comprising internal branding objectives, activities, moderators, and consequences (Burmann & Zeplin, 2005; Piehler et al., 2015). They validated the model in several studies across different contexts (Burmann et al., 2009; Piehler, 2018; Piehler et al., 2016). A German-Swiss cluster around Torsten Tomczak and Franz-Rudolf Esch introduced the behavioural branding concept. They outlined the brand behaviour funnel as the core of their approach in their edited book Behavioral Branding, proposing that internal branding activities affect internal branding objectives, leading to internal branding consequences (Tomczak et al., 2012). In addition, they published several journal articles on specific internal branding activities (Henkel et al., 2007; Morhart et al., 2009; Wentzel et al., 2010).

Finally, another cluster to develop internal branding emerged around Ceridwyn King and Debra Grace from Australia. Within the realm of services marketing, these authors investigated internal branding consequences, objectives, activities, and antecedents (King & Grace, 2005, 2008, 2012). Drawing from the concept of customer-based brand equity as ‘the differential effect of brand knowledge on consumer response to the marketing of the brand’ (Keller, 1993, p. 1), they also introduced the concept of employee-based brand equity, defined as ‘the differential effect that brand knowledge has on an employee’s response to internal brand management’ (King et al., 2012, p. 269).

Table 26.1 presents examples of other academic publications outside those identified research clusters that have advanced specific internal branding research areas.

After the initial growth of the field, academics engaged in structuring and consolidating fragmented internal branding knowledge and extending that knowledge. They achieved structure and consolidation through the publication of literature reviews (Barros-Arrieta & García-Cali, 2020; Saleem & Iglesias, 2016) and special issues in branding journals (e.g., 2018 special issue ‘Internal Brand Management’ in...