نقش تعاملات اجتماعی در ساختن نام های تجاری (برند) داخلی شرکت : مفاهیمی برای توسعه پایدار

This article examines internal brand building, which is defined as the alignment of a corporation and employees around a brand. The notion of social interactions may provide a valuable perspective on brand-related interactive space, in which top management communicates brand-related information to employees and employees share brand-related information. Depth interviews, observations, and documentary analysis reveal how a social interaction-based, internal, brand-building process influences employees’ actions and perceptions of the branded environment. Social interactions might generate brand commitment and shared brand beliefs in certain conditions. These findings have key implications for sustainability.

Internal brand building aims to align “an organization around a brand” according to a cluster of values (Tosti & Stotz, 2001, p. 30; see also Mitchell, 2002 and Thomson et al., 1999) and thus facilitate delivery of the external brand experience. Through this process, three perspectives on corporate branding come into alignment (for a review and interdisciplinary framework, see Brown et al., 2006 and Simões et al., 2005): actual (how the corporation views it), desired (how the corporation wants others to perceive it), and external (how others perceive it) (Aaker and Joachimsthaler, 2000, Balmer and Soenen, 1999 and Kapferer, 2004). Minimizing the gaps among these three perspectives has strategic importance, because stakeholders experience a corporate brand's values through its products and services, as well as at every touch point (Balmer & Wilkinson, 1991). Especially in service industries, in which encounters depend on the attitude and motivation of the corporation's employees (de Chernatony and Segal-Horn, 2001 and Punjaisri and Wilson, 2007), employees constitute a key resource. The perceived qualification, friendliness, and responsiveness of employees, as well as how well they “live” corporate brand values, help customers develop trust in service encounters (Berry, 2000). In this sense, companies need to embed their corporate brand within employees, such that it gains “standardized, categorized, generalized meanings” (Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2004, p. 643). Existing brand literature stresses the need for employee commitment to delivering brand values (Thomson et al., 1999). It identifies communication and social interaction as key facilitators of employees’ commitment to the brand and shared brand beliefs. To the best of our knowledge though, few studies adopt a cross-fertilization approach and examine communications and social interaction simultaneously (de Chernatony, Drury, & Segal-Horn, 2006). Yet social interaction – which we define as “the integration of social, environmental, and economic concerns into an organization's culture, decision-making, strategy, and operations” (Berger, Cunningham, & Drumwright, 2007) – may provide valuable insights into the brand-related interactive space that exists throughout the employee hierarchy and ultimately clarify a corporation's sustainability. Our study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, facilitating brand-supportive behavior is a complex, difficult undertaking, strongly influenced by both vertical and horizontal dynamics. In our study, we attempt to understand how employees develop, employ, and change the brand-related information they possess. Second, this approach reveals methods that management can use to influence brand-related social interactions and thus induce brand commitment and shared brand beliefs among employees (Morhart, Herzog, & Tomczak, 2009). Both the facilitation of brand-supportive behavior and influences on brand-related social interactions have important implications for sustainability literature. Internal branding relates to the development of a corporate brand, and better communicated values could improve the workplace environment, which would nurture social aspects of a corporation's sustainability. For example, if employees understand and appreciate what the organization's brand stands for, they may perceive their workplace as more meaningful. Third, customers buy from service providers that they perceive offer the best value (Best, 2004). Determinants of this perceived value include quality of the services offered, the staff that delivers the service, and the brand image the corporation communicates (Doyle, 2000 and Kotler and Keller, 2000). If customers trust their service providers, they tend to continue purchasing from them and offer much greater net present value than other customers (Reichheld, 1996). Therefore, these findings have key implications for the economic side of corporate sustainability. We structure the remainder of this article as follows: we outline key concepts by building on related research fields to define the conceptual anchors of brand commitment and shared brand beliefs; we also discuss how social interaction in general, and communication in particular, may facilitate their development; and we briefly discuss sustainability. After we discuss our methodology, we report on and discuss our study findings. We conclude with implications for sustainability, some study limitations, and avenues for further research.

Top management members have detailed knowledge about brand identity values and their meanings; across the diverse companies we study, they rate themselves as highly emotionally attached to the corporate brand. Theoretically, top managers understand the conditions in which employees accept shared brand beliefs, but the degree to which they actually induce brand commitment seems low. Management seemingly cannot activate the different levels of identities (or different foci of commitment) in which an employee is embedded. For example, management can communicate overall brand values, but it faces more difficulty when it tries to explain the meaning of these values in an employee's own work context. Most people exhibit more commitment to their own work than they do to the overall organization. Our findings help clarify how employees develop, employ, and alter the brand-related information they possess, as well as the methods that management can employ to influence brand-related social interactions. These processes induce brand commitment and shared brand beliefs among employees. Better communicated values also could lead to a better workplace environment, which nurtures the social aspect of sustainability, especially if employees participate in brand-related communication. This scenario ensures that employees understand and enact brand-related information, which leads to share brand beliefs. To engender shared beliefs in and care about brand-related issues, top management in our study preferred to develop staff through training. Training workshops then provide a platform for management to share brand-related information with employees. Because the sale of services demands interactions, staff members give customers the means to distinguish offers from multiple service companies operating in the marketplace. Brand-supportive behavior leads to a positive differentiation of the organization, and we argue that internal brand building and affective commitment facilitate such behaviors. Although resistance to change has been well documented (e.g., Chreim, 2002), research has largely overlooked the sequential psychological processes that people undergo to become brand ambassadors.