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Corporate branding necessitates a different management approach. It requires greater emphasis on factors internal to the organisation, paying greater attention to the role of employees in the brand building process. This paper explores the implications of corporate branding for the management of internal brand resources. We describe a model for managing brands through narrowing the gap between a brand’s identity and its reputation and, building on this, identify three key factors that affect brand perceptions and brand performance. Finally, we review some of the mechanisms that may be used to facilitate greater congruence of brand perceptions within the brand team and communication of a brand’s identity to employees.

Corporate Brand Identity is concerned with an internal process in a firm to develop and communicate its brand as a basic strategic perspective toward business markets. In business-to-business (B2B) markets, the market consists of specific firms and organizations as key counterparts. Brand identity thus needs to focus on creating value for potential others through understanding its own brand identity, i.e. what the firm stands for. Branding activities should be managed together with employees and matched with the central values of the brand. The brand identity is communicated toward key business partners who, in turn, perceive the brand and the value the firm promises to deliver in practice. Corporate identity and image are thus closely related issues. An important part of the corporate brand deals with relationships between actors on the market. This chapter presents two prominent corporate brand identity models and uses them jointly in order to analyze a practical case dealing with property management business in Finland. The chapter ends by offering suggestions for managing corporate brand identity processes in practice.

The purpose of the study is to inquire into and to provide an integrated framework of academics’ and practitioners’ conversations on corporate brand alignment.

A systematic literature review (with no time restrictions) was used to identify relevant journal publications from the years 2000 to 2013. Based on the retrieved articles, the Hegelian dialectic triad of “thesis, antithesis and synthesis” was used to inquire into conventional thinking on corporate brand management (i.e. through corporate brand alignment).

The final sample of 59 articles brought to light a theory of corporate brand alignment, its recent contradictions and critiques and scholars’ attempts to unify them into an integrated framework. Three main perspectives emerged, suggesting that corporate brand could be managed through aligned (i.e. thesis), separated (i.e. antithesis) or mixed approaches (i.e. synthesis).

This research considers only English peer-reviewed journal articles retrieved from the EBSCO and WOS databases.

This work proposes a contingency approach to corporate brand management, suggesting that there is no single best way of managing a corporate brand: aligned, separated and mixed approaches can be equally successful. Despite the choice of model (which arises from the analysis of the corporate brand meanings, stakeholders and contexts), three transversal corporate brand management imperatives emerged: the delivery of the corporate brand promise, the co-construction of corporate brand meanings and the recognition of the dynamic nature of corporate brands.

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.

This conceptual paper examines the notion of CEO brands and the problems that arise if they are misaligned with company brands. Previous research examines product, company and people brands and implications for senior executives and organizations, but there is no theoretical framework for CEO brand stewardship. This research aims to fill the gap.

The marketing literature is examined to identify differences between products and people as brands, and the potential for CEO brands to enhance corporate brand equity. Based on an application of existing branding concepts to CEOs, a conceptual model of CEO brands is developed to include an analysis of the relationships between its constituent parts.

CEO brands can be legitimately considered as brands, and existing brand conceptualisations can be applied to CEOs as long as some particularities are accounted for. CEO brands are influenced by their personality and their role as managers, and organisations need to constantly monitor CEO brand reputation as well as communicate its positioning. A successful CEO branding enhances perceived brand value and creates value for organisations.

This research informs brand managers and strategists about brand equity creation. Monitoring stakeholder perceptions of CEOs can enhance rather than detract from corporate brand value. As it showed that people and CEOs can be legitimately considered as brands, the concept of branding needs to be extended to embrace people and CEO brands.

For business practice, this research informs about the differences and similarities between traditional product brands and CEO brands. Particularly it informs that organisations should consider that the CEO brand personifies to stakeholders what the organisation stands for, for example, when hiring a new CEO.

This research provides a new conceptual model on the previously under‐researched area of CEO branding. The insights into CEO brands provide the basis for empirical research into relationships between brand identity, reputation, position and equity, with implications for personal fame and company fortune.

This paper aims to show how the relative global status of a country influences its internal country reputation and resulting social cognitions of citizens.

The theories of social identity and collective self-esteem were employed to explain how self-assessment and evaluations of a country’s reputation are regulated by social concepts and vice versa. The structural equation modeling technique was employed to estimate the conjectural relations.

The groups which people belong to are their primary source of pride and self-esteem. But if a country is negatively stereotyped on the global stage, it weakens the ability of people to live their nation’s brand. A formidable nation’s brand can only be constructed if people are deeply involved and committed to it.

The results of this study have implications for policymakers, nation’s branding experts and researchers to focus on internal branding of nations. The academicians and researchers should focus more on the internal audiences in their role as a “communication medium” to external audiences. A more purposeful internal branding will promote community strengthening and enable people to act as a mouth piece in communicating a desired experience to external audiences.

The existing nations branding literature does not show how relative global status of a country influences self-assessment and evaluations of people’s associations with that country. The present study aims to fill this gap by drawing on the theories of social identity, self-categorization and collective self-esteem to show how people’s self-perception in negatively perceived countries is regulated in relation to their country’s relative global status and its influence on resulting social cognitions.

The brand identity–image gap is a well-known marketing field. However, very little academic work has been done within the wine industry regarding collective brands. With the aim of filling this gap, this paper analyzes and describes the relationship between identity and the image of Bordeaux wines. It is intended as a collective wine brand.

From a positivist–functionalist perspective, a 45-question survey has been administered online to N = 53 internal brand operators (winery owners or managers) and to N = 655 external consumers (mainly focusing on 18–25 year-old segment). Nonprobabilistic sampling techniques have been used. Questions were structured within a semantic opposition.

Data analysis has shown that the nine-dimension model (physical, personality, culture, self-image, reflection, relationship, positioning, vision and heritage) is capable of collecting a richer and more pertinent set of information concerning the brand identity; statistically significant gaps have been found in 25 out of 45 items; counterintuitively, the consumers have a very different opinion about the brand compared with existing ideas. Direct implications are that internal brand operators may suffer from imposter syndrome; information asymmetry may play a central role in brand perception; and the brand lacks symbolic and inspirational functions.

Providing an original model to analyze and evaluate the brand identity–image gap, specifically adapted for collective wine brands, this work contributes to the literature by increasing the knowledge about brand identity issues.