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Studies that inquire in-depth into whether the Corporate Communications Officer (CCO) is an entrusted corporate executive and enacts a genuine leadership of his/her own style are generally neglected. The purpose of this paper is to unravel the leadership nature of the CCO beyond the managerial role. More specifically, the authors collected accounts of the span of the professional life and job experiences of CCOs, with the aim of understanding how their leadership, if any, can be depicted.

The authors developed a qualitative research design to grasp the complexity of the CCO job experience. The authors chose a narrative approach involving a purposive sample of CCOs operating in global companies based in Italy to elicit and nurture their spontaneous reconstruction of the significant moments of their working lives.

Based on the interpretive analysis, the capability of the CCO to overcome the trap of the formal appointment seems to rely on the organic emergence of a genuine leadership. The turning point between his/her resting on the appointment or becoming a genuine leader is marked by the display of his/her humanistic nature that can be ascribed to the enactment of a conversational leadership.

While this is an exploratory qualitative study, it holds heuristic value in deepening the specific nature of genuine CCO leadership beyond an essentially task-based analysis of its managerial profile.

This study is aimed at revisiting the supply chain (SC) of a company, highlighting how communication supports SC management, emphasising how SC relationship-based processes are fostered by communication flows, and exploring how SC performance may be enhanced through coordinated management of interpersonal and internet-mediated communication forms.

The study follows a two-step qualitative methodological approach encompassing the building of a preliminary conceptual mapping, and preliminary testing, integration and revision of the conceptual mapping.

The findings highlight communication's primary role in identity management and image building of the SC, and its supporting role enhancing strategic and operational SC processes. Communication seems to act as a “cultural glue”, a “trade-off and compensation”, a “knowledge creation and dissemination”, a “relationship development and maintenance”, and an “alignment and integration” activity along the SC, fostering knowledge, managerial, relational and competitive SC performance dimensions.

The combination of SC and corporate communication academic knowledge with field SC managerial expertise allows the proposal of a preliminary conceptual framework illustrating the potential links among SC processes, communication and SC performance. The study provides also a set of research propositions to guide both future research and managerial practice in communication management along the SC.

This study offers a first exploratory “communicational view” of the SC, which beyond analysing communication in the corporate locus of the typical communication function explores the value of communication that is embedded in manufacturing processes and routines at the basis of corporate performance by developing a cross-functional communication approach.

Purpose: This study explores how the interplay between a passionate consumer and his embeddedness in the lively network of a consumer tribe represents a fertile environment for the emergence of an entrepreneurial venture that is able to combine micro- and macro-level concerns bridging tribe and marketplace needs.

Design/methodology/approach: The research, set within the context of an exemplar consumer’s entrepreneurial project, was conducted following a netnographic methodological approach.

Findings: By fluidly moving from within to outside the tribe in the wider marketplace, the entrepreneur crafts his own new space in the market through a cultural mediation work that effectively combines the affective, immaterial labor characterizing the social glue of the tribe collective ethos with entrepreneurial spirit and sharp marketing and consumer insight abilities. The entrepreneur acts as a resource integrator of traditional firm-driven and emerging consumer-driven marketplace without opposing existing market structures, but rather valorizing them through his intermediation work.

Research limitations: This is a single-case study that, although exemplar, needs to be expanded and consolidated with further empirical evidence.

Originality/value: The study contributes to extant literature on consumer-driven market emergence and new market system dynamics by uncovering the role of consumer entrepreneur as a reconfigurator of the existing market resources.

Extant branding literature is dominated by a metaphorical view of value co-creation in which the roles of brand actors remain unspecified. To help provide clarity, the purpose of this paper is to critically appraise how brand professionals understand brand value co-creation and perceive their role in facilitating it, with the aim of questioning its viability in day-to-day brand management practices.

Building on brand professionals’ reflexivity, the study develops a qualitative methodological glance via semi-structured interviews based on confrontational techniques with a purposive sample of 28 experienced brand decision-makers.

Brand professionals perceive accessibility, reciprocity and citizenship as the gateways provided by the firm for value co-creation to happen. Despite their enthusiastic rhetorical afflatus in making explicit their viewpoints about how firms can facilitate value co-creation, the current translation into practice of the role of the firm does not seem to be able to overcome the sender-biased approach that still resides in brand management.

To go beyond the limits of rhetorical representations and make brand value facilitation more actionable, the authors provide guidelines on how firms can create and enhance the circumstances for the co-creation of brand value to occur in interactions with consumers and stakeholders.

This study contributes to the critical actionability of the brand value co-creation by elucidating how firms currently perceive their facilitation role. The paper provides strategic recommendations to put co-creation rhetoric into practice by reframing and expanding the scope and the significance of brand management.

This paper aims to investigate the conceptualisation of corporate communication management (CCM) and its dimensionality from the practitioners’ perspectives. It proposes to validate an operational definition and dimensions of the CCM construct, which have not been identified in the literature.

The initial concepts are based on academic literature and followed by 12 face-to-face interviews with corporate communication practitioners and consultants from Malaysia to confirm the practicality of each dimension. QSR Nvivo Version 9.0 software is used to analyse the qualitative data. Then, the data are classified through deductive content analysis based on key words or themes.

The diverse perspectives are shown from the practitioners and consultants on the dimensionality of CCM. Most of the interviewees suggest that CCM dimensions include corporate advertising, corporate affairs, investor relations and employee communication within the corporate communication and other departments. They also found the public relations and media relations are clearly under corporate communications manager’s supervision. This research confirms the concept of CCM and its dimensionality to operationalise the CCM construct. The CCM dimensions also offer opportunities for further research to develop the measurement scales.

This research contributes to the clarification on the subject matter by developing clear concepts of the CCM and by offering insights about the role of the CCM dimensions, which help managers to more successfully incorporate the CCM dimension into the corporate management strategy. This paper also examines the concept of CCM and confirms its dimensionality, which helps in developing the CCM measurement for further quantitative research.

This paper aims to provide a degree of clarity on the corporate communication management (CCM) concept, by building a conceptual framework that uncovers its underlying antecedents and consequences. Although it is consolidated that corporate communication and information together play an important role in strategic management planning because of the high relevance of managing positive relationships with multiple stakeholder that have a strong impact on corporate survival, extant literature suggests that there have been few empirical studies so far assessing the contribution of CCM to organisational performance.

The paper is conceptual, and a model is developed as a result of an extensive critical multidisciplinary literature review.

Findings of this study identify three antecedents of CCM, namely, culture, information and communication technology innovation diffusion and corporate leadership. In addition, the study highlights a potential positive relationship between CCM, financial performance and corporate mission achievement. An integrative conceptual framework and a detailed summary table are presented in the paper.

This study provides a comprehensive critical insight into a growing body of corporate communication and information business literature that offers the basis for a thorough assessment of CCM contribution to organisational performance. By doing so, it advances the body of applicable knowledge of corporate communication meant as a strategic management lever. Moreover, the managerial and policy implications provided in this paper may help corporate communication and information practitioners to identify the key guidelines for the design and implementation of an appropriate CCM programme.