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The purpose of this study is to perform a historical analysis of the brand management system (BMS) to understand why and how, over the past century, the BMS has become the dominant marketing organizational model across Western countries and sectors and what the lessons can be learned from history to enlighten its current changes in today’s digitized environment.

Building on Low and Fullerton’s work (1994), the paper traces the evolution of the BMS from its creation in the 1930s to the recent digital era. Data from various sources – research papers, historical business books, case studies, newspaper articles and internal documents – are analyzed to inform an intellectual historical analysis of the BMS’s development.

The paper uses the prism of institutional isomorphism to highlight four distinct periods that show that the BMS has gradually imposed itself on the Western world and managed to adapt to an ever-changing environment. Moreover, it shows that in the current digital age, the BMS is now torn between two opposing directions: the brand manager should act as both absolute expert and galvanic facilitator and the BMS needs to reinvent itself once again.

This paper provides a broad perspective on the BMS function to help marketing scholars, historians and practitioners gain a better understanding of the issues currently facing the BMS and its relevance in the digital age.

This research aims to contribute to the current discussion led by international accounting bodies on intellectual capital narratives. Before setting a standard, a preliminary step is to highlight intellectual capital components' sources of value. The objective of this exploratory paper is to contribute to the discussion by proposing a detailed description and taxonomy of intellectual capital based on an analysis of discretionary accounting narrative disclosures in CEO letters.

To answer the research question, a computerised lexical content analysis was done of 241 letters from the CEOs of S&P Euro 350 companies addressed to shareholders.

Beyond the required disclosures about balance sheet intangibles, this study brings to light discretionary narratives about human, digital, customer and environmental capital and their interactions. In particular, CEOs are promoting two new themes, environmental capital and digital capital, as major contributors to value creation.

The limitations of this study are inherent in the media studied, namely the CEOs' letters to shareholders, which were written as part of the firms' official communication.

The main contribution of the research is a detailed description of the intellectual capital components that CEOs consider to be at the heart of their companies' models to create value. Human and customer capital were already familiar under the previous classification, but CEOs present digital and environmental capital as areas of opportunity or risk in their discretionary narratives.

The article contributes to the current international discussions on intellectual capital by focusing on discretionary accounting narratives. It seeks to provide guidelines concerning future standards in the current stage of intellectual capital research.