Search results

Past integrated marketing communications (IMC) frameworks have established brand contacts as important sources of information and feedback. This paper aims to discuss how the presence of multiple brand stakeholders and the proliferation of digital media increase the amount of brand information generated exponentially. When a firm fails to harness this information, it risks misalignment between brand identity and brand image, which, in turn, tarnishes brand-equity.

Past IMC frameworks are reviewed and extended to identify specific brand contact points between multiple stakeholders that hold significant potential to dynamically reconfigure brand identity. Theoretical propositions regarding the IMC function’s role in managing these contact points to generate brand-equity are offered.

The brand contacts described and their successful integration into a firm’s brand-equity strategy extend current IMC-based brand-equity models and suggest fruitful, novel avenues for creating brand-equity. Further, these brand contacts offer practical examples of how the scope of marketing communications can be redefined.

This paper contributes to the body of research on the elevation of IMC to a strategic level function. In addition to the synergistic communication of the brand offering, IMC needs to play a pivotal role in coordinating the contacts between the brand and stakeholders, and in extrapolating relevant brand insights from these contacts.

Migrant workers often suffer from social exclusion in the workplace and therefore identify less with their organization and engage less with their work. To address this issue, the authors integrate research on migrant workers with research on the group engagement model to create a model for understanding and enhancing migrant worker engagement. This allows us to provide insight into how organizations can design their human resource management systems and practices to increase the work engagement of migrant workers.

The authors conducted a survey study with over 4,000 employees from more than 500 workplaces in Australia to test the model.

The results of the multilevel analysis indicate that a procedurally fair work environment increases organizational identification, which in turn is associated with higher work engagement. The results also indicate that procedural justice climate is more important for migrant workers and increases their organizational identification and engagement.

To increase work engagement of migrant workers, organizations can establish a procedurally fair work environment in which cultural minorities experience unbiased policies and procedures, are able to express their opinions and participate in decision-making.

With the popularity of social media platforms, firms have now tangible means not only to reach out to their stakeholders, but also to closely monitor those interactions. Yet, there are limited methodological advances on how to measure a firm’s stakeholder networks, and the level of engagement firms have with these networks. Drawn upon the customer engagement and stakeholder theory literature, this study aims to propose an approach to calculate a firm’s stakeholder network engagement (SNE) index.

After deriving the SNE index formula mathematically, this study illustrates how the SNE index functions using eight firms’ online corporate social responsibility (CSR) networks across four diverse industries.

This study proposes and illustrates a new approach of capturing the SNE in a stakeholder network for use by academic and practical researchers.

Researchers can use the SNE index to assess engagement in stakeholder networks in various contexts.

Managers can use the SNE index to assess, benchmark and improve the nature and quality of their CSR strategies to derive greater return on their CSR investments.

Building on the stakeholder, communication and network analysis literatures, this study conceptualises SNE in four theoretical dimensions, namely, diffusion, accessibility, interactivity and influence. Then, an index that measures SNE is mathematically derived and empirically illustrated.

This study aims to examine intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) on Twitter by 60 of the world’s largest companies and explains the main themes communicated to stakeholders. The second objective is to determine which topics provoke most stakeholders’ reactions.

The authors perform content analysis on more than 42,000 tweets to examine ICD practices along with the reactions of stakeholders in the form of retweets and “favorites” toward the information disclosed.

Intellectual capital (IC) is an important theme in corporate disclosure practices, as more than one-third of the published tweets refer to IC. The world’s largest companies focus on relational capital information, followed by human and structural capital. The main IC themes disclosed were management philosophy, corporate reputation and business partnering. Tweets related to IC are of greater interest to stakeholders than other tweets and provoke more reactions. There is no complete consistency between the topics most intensively disclosed by companies and those that elicit the most vivid responses from the addressees.

This study offers an understanding of the world’s largest companies’ practices that refer to ICD via social media and has implications for organizations in the creation and use of communication channels when developing a dialogue with stakeholders on topics regarding IC that may lead to better management of IC performance.

This paper is a response to the call for studies on ICD via social media, which is strongly highlighted in the recent literature concerning future research on IC and until now was almost absent in the field of business units. This research provides in-depth insights into the use of Twitter to disclose IC elements and indicates which fields and topics of this disclosure provoke stakeholders’ reactions, which is a novelty in ICD studies.