Building an empirically robust framework for corporate brand commiunications using action research

This thesis aims to develop a more robust framework for understanding the management processes involved in Corporate Brand Communications. A review of the literature on corporate branding shows a growing body of conceptual work, but also highlights that much of the recent work in the field has not focused on the underlying processes involved in managing a corporate brand. There is, therefore, a clear need to understand how a corporate brand is defined, developed and communicated. This international study adopts a Participatory Action Research approach, grounded in Intervention Theory (Argyris, 1973), to develop an intervention framework based on the concept of privileged access' (Torbet, 1991). This methodological framework is tested on a pilot study and then adopted for the study of three separate organisations in the UK, France and the Netherlands to answer three distinct, but related Research Questions. Based upon the findings emerging from these studies, the researcher identifies a series of emergent management stages', and uses this empirical evidence to develop a new Six Conventions' framework for understanding the processes of nurturing and managing a corporate brand. The study makes an explicit contribution to the field by helping to join up' many of the existing, disparate conceptual models. It makes a further significant contribution by grounding the Six Conventions' framework in rich empirical data in a way that operationalizes the inherent management processes in a new and more robust manner than previous studies. These findings offer both new insight to academics, and a set of guiding principles and practices for managers engaged in managing brands at an organisational level, fulfilling the requirements of Participatory Action Research to generate both Propositional and Practical knowledge. A further methodological contribution is provided by demonstration of the potential that participatory approaches, utilising the concept of this privileged access', offer in contrast to traditional case research. This leads to the development of a new process to guide effective intervention studies of management processes.