Corporate branding: Where are we? A systematic communication-based inquiry

Abstract

Despite the widely recognized relevance of corporate branding (CB) to gain competitive advantage, CB studies suffer from highly fragmented perspectives that make it difficult to discern the value of CB and orient its practices. Our study is aimed at clarifying how CB has been approached in the academic and practitioners' literature so far to identify the contribution of these different perspectives. To investigate the debate on CB, we adopted a systematic software-assisted content analysis, appropriate when the research aims are to disentangle multiple perspectives on a phenomenon. Software-aided content analysis allows a rigorous treatment of a text highlighting recurrent themes, their semantic links, co-occurrences and correspondences among lexical units. Our findings suggest that CB is a crucial crossroad between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of a company acting as a ‘bridge’ among key intangibles and as an ‘inside–outside’ interface between company and stakeholders. The Thematic Analysis of Elementary Contexts highlights four clusters related to how CB and communication have been conceived. In discussing the findings, we propose integrated marketing communications (IMC) as a conceptual and managerial framework capable of making sense out of CB complexity and casting light on the complementarities between the often conflicting academic and practitioners' views on CB.

Keywords::

• corporate branding
• communication
• intangible assets
• integrated marketing communications
• content analysis

Notes

^1. The two sub-corpora considered in the analysis were of different lengths and derived from different numbers of sources. However, the fact that all T-lab comparisons are based on χ² tests helps the researcher cast light (only) on significant thematic differences in the sub-corpora under investigation, and to avoid biases due to the differing sizes and compositions of the sub-corpora (Lancia 2004).

^2. It is to point out that in practitioners' literature the word ‘reputation’ was used simply as a synonym of ‘image’, thus anchoring practitioners' literature mentioning ‘reputation’ to the first of the three identified shifts.

^3. The Cosine Coefficient measure was first used by Salton and McGill (1984) in information retrieval studies to evaluate the degree of association between documents and words, and later to automatically classify both elements (i.e. document clustering and key word clustering).

^4. In linguistics, lemmas are the head words of dictionary entries.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Silvia Biraghi

Silvia Biraghi, PhD, is a research associate at LABCOM (Research Lab on Business Communication), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, Italy). In 2013 she received her PhD in Corporate Communication at IULM University. In 2012 she was a visiting scholar at Boston University Department of Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations (Boston, MA). Her current research topics include consumer-brand engagement, unconventional branding, corporate branding, and internal communication.

Rossella Chiara Gambetti

Rossella C. Gambetti, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Management Sciences at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, where she teaches Corporate and Marketing Communication and she coordinates the International Postgraduate Master in Corporate Communication. Her current research topics include consumer-brand engagement, unconventional brand communications, and branding strategies. She has published in California Management Review, Health Risk & Society, International Journal of Market Research, Corporate Communications: an International Journal.