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Identity perspectives on corporate and organisational marketing
Edited by John M.T. Balmer and Shaun M. Powell
Introduction
[5] Balmer (2009) indicates that corporate marketing allows the synthesis of a myriad of corporate-wide concepts such as corporate identity, corporate image, corporate branding, corporate reputation and corporate communications. These are encompassed within the corporate marketing mix ([7] Balmer and Greyser, 2006), which relates to the six elements or the 6Cs of corporate marketing: corporate identity (character), corporate communications (communications), stakeholders (constituencies), covenant (corporate brand promise), corporate image and reputation (conceptualisation) and organisational cultures (culture). This paper focuses on the management of the corporate brand promise in service organisations, an activity that needs to take account of each of the other elements of the corporate marketing mix and in particular internal stakeholders.
In a service organisation, the delivery of the corporate brand or "brand covenant" ([6] Balmer and Gray, 2003) is frequently dependant on staff effectively delivering the core values of the company to the customer. Indeed, [16] De Chernatony (2002) postulates that service staff are the embodiment of the corporate brand through the adoption of behaviours that support a predetermined and common set of brand values. Internal branding activities are therefore seen ([13] Cleaver, 1999) as being as important as external branding activities in communicating and delivering the brand promise to the customer. This communicated promise needs to reflect the uniqueness of the corporate brand ([26] Ingenhoff and Fuhrer, 2010) in order to ensure a corporate brand's virtue as a source of an organisation's competitiveness ([4] Balmer, 2001).
Despite the growing interest in internal branding, there has been very little research undertaken on the subject from the employees' perspective. The focus has tended to be on the perspectives of management and brand consultants, looking at the issue from a top-down viewpoint. Therefore, this study focuses on front-line employees and their perceptions of internal branding influencers and the extent to which personal and work environment factors moderate the success of internal branding in the reinforcement of brand-supporting attitudes and behaviours among employees. The research, based on a multiple case study representing the hotel industry in Thailand, involved the completion of 30 in-depth qualitative interviews with customer-interface employees followed by a quantitative survey with 680 customer-interface employees located in...