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The purpose of this paper is to review a case study of a recent corporate rebranding initiative to examine how staff respond to changed values.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments.

A couple of years ago, a telecommunications firm, TELCI, underwent a corporate rebranding initiative (pseudonyms will be used for company names to preserve anonymity). The firm had started out as a regional TELCOM, established by an energy company ENER. In its fourth year, the company acquired a leading internet provider, INT. After rapid development TELCOM floated a year later, with ENER retaining a majority share. Just before this happened, TELCOM had gone through the rebranding exercise that saw it become TELCI. After this series of changes, senior management believed they had come to rest on a brand that reflected its aim to be a leading player in the telecommunications, call centre and internet services sectors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this belief did not quite match the reality.

Managers should target organization‐wide buy‐in towards new brand values, and consider how they all address the organization's subcultures and resistance to change.

The paper offers managers a rare empirical study of the process of cultural alignment in corporate re‐branding.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents and consequences of the implementation of different customer feedback mechanisms with regard to their contribution to organisational learning that leads to service improvement.

A critical case organisation is chosen to explore the link between the implementation of customer feedback mechanisms and organisational learning from a middle management and employee perspective. Method triangulation is adopted, gathering qualitative and quantitative data.

Organisational learning in relation to service improvement is influenced by the interplay between the way data are gathered through customer feedback mechanisms and implemented at a branch or business unit level. The implementation depends on attitudes of middle management towards such mechanisms.

Future studies might investigate whether the findings can be replicated in other operational settings and triangulate the data with customer perceptions of service improvement.

Customer feedback mechanisms at an organisational and business unit level need better integration. To gather customer feedback that enables more meaningful decision‐making to improve services, middle management needs to have a stronger involvement in the design and implementation of customer feedback mechanisms. Central efforts have to be placed on the support of middle management in the interpretation and use of data that is gathered through organisation‐wide feedback initiatives.

This paper contributes to extant knowledge by integrating the fields of service performance management practices, in this case the implementation of customer feedback mechanisms, and organisational learning.

The purpose of this paper is to audit the use of three strategies for protecting hospital inpatients with allergies: red allergy wristbands for patients with allergies; white identification wristbands for all patients; and completion of an “allergy box” on drug charts. The paper also aims to assess the impact of making pharmacists responsible for ensuring allergy box completion.

The setting was The Whittington Hospital, London, a district general hospital. Two cross‐sectional studies were conducted 11 months apart, before and after pharmacists were made responsible for ensuring allergy box completion. The studies involved 186 (pre‐intervention) and 250 (post‐intervention) unselected adult patients.

The proportion of blank allergy boxes decreased significantly from 24.7 per cent to 5.2 per cent (p<0.001) when pharmacists were made responsible for ensuring allergy box completion. The most common reason for blank allergy boxes in both studies was that doctors sought and documented allergies in the notes but then forgot to complete the allergy box. Although the proportion of patients lacking allergy wristbands was less in the second study compared with the first (30.4 v. 44.8 per cent, respectively), the difference was not significant (p=0.206). Similarly, the second study showed a non‐significant decrease in the proportion of patients lacking identification wristbands from 12.9 per cent to 10.8 per cent (p=0.499).

A formal checking system is required for allergy and identification wristbands to improve use of these basic, inexpensive measures for preventing drug errors.

The paper shows that making pharmacists responsible for ensuring allergy status documentation on drug charts significantly increased use of this safety measure.

This paper reports on a programme of research in the UK aimed at examining the role of mystery shopping in the measurement and management of service quality. The research focused on the views of the senior managers responsible for commissioning mystery shopping research and the directors of market research agencies responsible for the provision of such research. The research findings identify the main uses of mystery shopping in the UK and the methods used to maximise the reliability of the technique. The study also discovers that organisations rarely integrate mystery shopping results with other measures of service delivery performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate value co-creation processes from the focal dyad of the patient and the physician and how their experiences in the consulting room affect the value that is created.

Semi-structured interviews incorporating the critical incident technique (CIT) were conducted with 8 doctors and 24 outpatients in selected hospitals in Ghana, exploring their experiences during their encounter in the service delivery impacting on the value creating healthcare opportunities. An abductive and thematic analytical approach was used to identify 76 useable critical incidents that had clear consequences on both the outcome of the service and the service experiences of the patient.

The study reveals three critical areas needed to support the value co-creation process and respective elements or activities to be considered during the service encounter. The critical areas comprise of the social context, beliefs and perceptions, and partnership between the focal dyad. The findings also suggests that patients do not consider “getting well” as the only value that they seek, but also the total experiences they go through in the consulting room. Also some physicians find it difficult to accept the recent changes in the patients’ behaviour and attitudes, resulting in knowledge conflict that adversely affects actors’ experiences in the consulting room.

The study considered only one of the many professionals in the healthcare delivery, which may affect the true value perceptions of the patient.

The study provides service providers understanding of the processes that influence the patients’ experiences and value creation and the changing trends in the patient’s attitudes. The findings suggest a need for providers to take a holistic view of the service delivery and consider the critical areas, which could impact on the overall service outcomes.

This study extends the research on CIT to exploring the value co-creating processes in the healthcare setting. This also provides clarity in understanding the interdependence of the two actors and how this is managed as a resource in the value co-creation process at the micro level.

WITH decimal currency achieved, another major upheaval to our national way of life looms on the horizon. We are no strangers to metrication. It was officially recognized by the Metric Act of 1864 which limited its use to scientific purposes. A further Weights and Measures (Metric System) Act, 1897, made it lawful to use the metric system in industry and commerce, but made almost no difference to the country's daily life.

Water‐borne coatings continue to be of importance owing to widespread concern about the potentially harmful effects associated with the release of organic solvents into the atmosphere. This concern is reflected in their relative growth as a share of the total market. In the UK, for example, the proportion of paint (by volume) that was water‐based rose from 46 per cent in 1970 to 60 per cent in 1990, and the trend still appears to be upward.

Examines the nature of corporate culture in a service delivery environment. In particular, attempts to examine the level of consensus that exists with regard to the norms, values and behaviour of service personnel. The research included a programme of quantitative research within one retail bank, involving the completion of a questionnaire by 268 branch staff in 48 bank branches. The research found no evidence to suggest that corporate values and attitudes are shared by all of the service personnel in an organization. Instead there is a mix of company‐wide consensus on some issues and subcultural consensus on others. Therefore cultural consensus can occur at a corporate level, at a service team level or at a hierarchical level within an organization.

This article reviews different viewpoints in the marketing literature in an attempt to clearly define the concept of corporate reputation and identify its relationship with corporate image. Definitions offered for the term corporate reputation by marketing academics and practitioners are therefore merged into two dominant schools of thought. These include the analogous school of thought, which views corporate reputation as synonymous with corporate image, and the differentiated school of thought, which considers the terms to be different and, according to the majority of the authors, interrelated. This article argues that on balance, the weight of literature suggests that there is a dynamic, bilateral relationship between a firm’s corporate reputations and its projected corporate images. Future research is therefore encouraged to explore how corporate reputations influence and are influenced by all the ways in which the company projects its images: its behaviour, communication and symbolism.