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Family businesses feature prominently in economies, including the South African wine industry, using websites to convey their family identity. This research paper aims to explore the family identity elements that family wineries use on their websites, their alignment and how these are communicated online.

Based on Gioia’s methodology, a two-pronged approach was used to analyze 113 wineries’ websites’ text using Atlas. ti from an interpretivist perspective.

South African wineries use corporate identity, corporate personality and corporate expression to illustrate their familiness on their websites. It is portrayed through their family name and heritage, supported by their direction, purpose and aspirations, which emerge from the family identity and personality. These are dynamic and expressed through verbal and visual elements. Wineries described their behaviour, relevant competencies and passion as personality traits. Sustainability was considered an integral part of their brand promise, closely related to their family identity and personality, reflecting their family-oriented philosophy. These findings highlight the integration that exists among these components.

Theoretically, this study proposes a family business brand identity framework emphasising the centrality of familiness to its identity, personality and expression. Using websites to illustrate this familiness is emphasised with the recommendation that family businesses leverage this unique attribute in their identity to communicate their authenticity.

This study contributes to understanding what family wineries communicate on their websites, specifically by examining the elements necessary to create a family business brand based on the interrelationship between family identity, personality and expression with familiness at its core, resulting in a proposed family business brand identity framework.

Purpose statements persuade stakeholders of companies' reasons for being. The goal of this study was to analyze how purpose-driven companies craft their purpose, mission and vision statements and whether and how purpose statements differ from mission and vision statements.

This quantitative content analysis explored the brand personality traits, mission statement components and corporate ethos appeals that purpose-driven companies included in their purpose, mission and vision statements.

Results provide implications for corporate leaders and communicators who write these statements as well as theoretical implications related to brand personality, rhetorical theory and corporate ethos.

This research provides practical implications for corporate leaders and communication professionals about how to craft these statements, what components they might include and the potential benefits and downfalls of not clearly differentiating among purpose, mission and vision statements.

While several studies have compared differences between mission and vision statements, there is a lack of academic literature on how companies craft purpose statements. This study added to this body of knowledge on corporate communication.

This paper aims to operationalise and juxtapose variables related to identity, strategy and communications, and then examine the impact of such integration on organisational stakeholders’ trust, loyalty and commitment by using commitment/trust theory.

This research design utilises explanatory research at the preliminary stage, as informed by the literature and conceptual framework. The subsequent model was examined via a positivist survey carried out among stakeholders in high-end retail stores in London. Structural equation modelling (SEM) via AMOS was conducted to gain insight into the various relevant influences and relationships.

The results indicate that identity and strategy are key drivers of integrated corporate communication, and they serve to build stakeholder trust, loyalty and commitment.

The paper shows that while practitioners have indicated that integrated marketing communication is important for organisations, there are a few other areas of concern with regard to consequences related to trust, loyalty and commitment, especially in a retail context. This paper empirically examined relationships between these constructs by validating a conceptual model by using SEM.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Interactive Network Branding (INB) as an emergent process where the corporate identity and reputation of a small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) are created through interpersonal interaction. The INB process is socially constructed through interaction between individual people who act on behalf of their companies in business relationships and networks.

The study is conceptual. Drawing on corporate branding literature, IMP research and empirical studies as well as short illustrative cases from SME contexts, the paper provides a conceptual description of INB and its sub-processes. Corporate branding literature offers conceptual understanding of corporate identity and reputation; the recent IMP-based studies offer an overview of current thinking within the paradigm, and the empirical studies and case examples from SMEs show the validity of the interpersonal approach for the INB.

The paper provides an enhanced understanding of INB in which interpersonal interaction lead to the creation of a corporate brand – as an integral part of the companies’ networking process. Three types of interpersonal interactions are distinguished: internal, external, and boundary spanning, the latter occurring at the borderline of the company and its environment. A process model of INB is proposed that specify the role of various interactions for the emerging process.

Since the paper is conceptual, further research is needed to study the INB process empirically and in more depth in different SME contexts and through differing interaction perspectives.

Managerial implications denote the crucial role of individuals in performing INB. Through interpersonal interactions, SMEs are able to create their identity and reputation, i.e. a strong corporate brand, and thereby to influence their network position.

This paper is one of the first attempts to link the IMP network approach with corporate branding literature, while focusing on the interpersonal interactions. The study builds bridges between these two distant but important research paradigms and contributes to each by developing a process perspective on corporate branding in business networks. This new approach to corporate branding seen through business interactions offers unique conceptual and managerial implications.

Aaker’s brand personality scale (BPS) published in 1997 has revived hitherto sluggish interest in brand personality research. With time, the BPS, most cited work in brand personality, also faced criticism across dimensions. This paper aims to review the popular journals published after 1997 for criticism related to BPS.

Papers using Aaker’s BPS without change/with change are identified and scrutinized for reasons for the usage of BPS. Papers on brand personality that have avoided BPS are also scrutinized for reasons of avoidance. Independent efforts of understanding brand personality without Aaker’s framework are also reviewed. In-depth study of all these papers is done to report the criticism of Aaker’s BPS.

This review identifies the criticism of BPS and classifies it across six categories – definition, dimension, methodology, concept, words and generalizability related criticism. This paper argues that some issues such as definition, conceptual understanding of brand personality and methodology used to develop BPS need further attention of scholars. On the other hand, issues of dimensions, words used and generalizability can be attributed to evident reasons, such as culture and meaning given to words because of native language.

This criticism and interest in Aaker’s BPS are unprecedented. It has been 20 years since BPS was published. Many scholars have countered the Aaker’s BPS through their work; however, a comprehensive review covering all criticisms and issues of BPS is still missing in literature. This paper is filling this gap in literature.

La Escala de Personalidad de Marca de Aaker fue publicada en 1997 y desde entonces ha motivado el interés por la investigación de la personalidad de la marca. Con el tiempo, esta escala se ha convertido en la más citada, pero también ha sido objeto de crítica. Este artículo revisa las principales críticas a la escala desde su publicación en 1997.

Se analizaron los artículos que utilizaron la escala de personalidad de marca de Aaker sin cambios o con cambios y los motivos de uso. Se examinaron los trabajos que evitaron utilizar la escala y las razones argumentadas. También se analizaron los esfuerzos realizados para comprender la personalidad de marca al margen de este enfoque. El análisis en profundidad de todos estos trabajos permitió sintetizar las principales críticas vertidas hacia la escala de personalidad de marca de Aaker.

Las críticas a la escala de personalidad de marca fueron clasificadas en seis categorías - Definición, Dimensión, Metodología, Concepto, Palabras utilizadas y Capacidad de generalización. El artículo argumenta que algunas cuestiones como la definición, la comprensión conceptual de la personalidad de la marca y la metodología utilizada para desarrollar la escala requieren mayor atención por parte de los académicos. Por otra parte, los problemas relacionados con las dimensiones, las palabras utilizadas y la capacidad de generalización pueden atribuirse a razones evidentes como la cultura, diferente significado de las palabras en distintos países, etc.

Las críticas e interés generado por la escala de personalidad de marca de Aaker no tienen precedentes. Han pasado 20 años desde su publicación y son muchos los investigadores han vertido sus críticas específicas. Sin embargo, en la literatura se echa en falta algún trabajo que revise todas estas críticas de forma integrada. Este artículo pretende cubrir este vacío en la literatura.

The role of chief executive officer (CEO) personal characteristics in shaping corporate policies has attracted increasing academic attention in the past two decades. In this review, the authors synthesize extant research on CEO attributes by reviewing 232 articles published in 29 journals from the accounting, finance and management literature. This review provides an overview of existing findings, highlights current trends and interdisciplinary differences in research approaches and identifies potential avenues for future research.

To review the literature on CEO attributes, the authors manually collected peer-reviewed articles in accounting, finance and management journals from 2000 to 2021. The authors conducted in-depth analysis of each paper and manually recorded the theories, data sources, country of study, study period, measures of CEO attributes and dependent variables. This procedure helped the authors group the selected articles into themes and sub-themes. The authors compared the findings in various disciplines and provided direction for future research.

The authors highlight the role of CEO personal attributes in influencing corporate decision-making and firm outcomes. The authors categorize studies of CEO traits into three main research themes: (1) demographic attributes and experience (including age, gender, culture, experience, education); (2) CEO interactions with others (social and political networks) and (3) underlying attributes (including personality, values and ideology). The evidence shows that CEO characteristics significantly affect a wide range of specific corporate policies that serve as mechanisms through which individual CEOs determine firm success and performance.

CEO selection is one of the most crucial decisions made by corporations. The study findings provide valuable insights to corporate executives, boards, investors and practitioners into how CEOs’ personal characteristics can impact future firm decisions and outcomes that can, in turn, inform the high-stake process of CEO recruitment and selection. The study findings have significant practical implications for corporations, such as contributing to executive training programs, to assist executives and directors attain a greater level of self-awareness.

Building on the theoretical foundation of upper echelons theory, the authors offer an integrated theoretical framework to consolidate existing empirical research on the impacts of CEO personal attributes on firm outcomes across accounting and finance (A&F) and management literature. The study findings provide a roadmap for scholars to bridge the interdisciplinary divide between A&F and management research. The authors advocate a more holistic and multifaceted approach to examining CEOs, each of whom embodies a myriad of personal characteristics that comprise their unique identity. The study findings encourage future researchers to expand the investigation of the boundary conditions that magnify or moderate the impacts of CEO idiosyncrasies.