This thesis aims to develop a more robust framework for understanding the
management processes involved in Corporate Brand Communications.
A review of the literature on corporate branding shows a growing body of conceptual
work, but also highlights that much of the recent work in the field has not focused on
the underlying processes involved in managing a corporate brand. There is, therefore, a
clear need to understand how a corporate brand is defined, developed and
communicated.
This international study adopts a Participatory Action Research approach, grounded in
Intervention Theory (Argyris, 1973), to develop an intervention framework based on the
concept of privileged access' (Torbet, 1991). This methodological framework is tested
on a pilot study and then adopted for the study of three separate organisations in the
UK, France and the Netherlands to answer three distinct, but related Research
Questions.
Based upon the findings emerging from these studies, the researcher identifies a series
of `emergent management stages', and uses this empirical evidence to develop a new
`Six Conventions' framework for understanding the processes of nurturing and
managing a corporate brand. The study makes an explicit contribution to the field by
helping to `join up' many of the existing, disparate conceptual models. It makes a
further significant contribution by grounding the `Six Conventions' framework in rich
empirical data in a way that operationalizes the inherent management processes in a
new and more robust manner than previous studies.
These findings offer both new insight to academics, and a set of guiding principles and
practices for managers engaged in managing brands at an organisational level, fulfilling
the requirements of Participatory Action Research to generate both Propositional and
Practical knowledge. A further methodological contribution is provided by demonstration of the potential that
participatory approaches, utilising the concept of this privileged access', offer in
contrast to traditional case research. This leads to the development of a new process to
guide effective intervention studies of management processes