Incorporating Business Unit Managers' Perspectives in Corporate-branding Strategy Decision Making
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Volume 5 Numbers 2 and 3
Incorporating Business Unit Managers’ Perspectives in Corporate-branding Strategy Decision Making Cees B. M. van Riel and Gerrit H. van Bruggen Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
ABSTRACT In making successful decisions about the way business units should use a corporate brand in their communication activities it is important to carefully consider business units’ management perspectives. In this paper the SIDEC model that suggests under which conditions business unit managers will be willing to support a uniform corporate branding strategy and under which conditions they will favor a varied strategy where business units will be more autonomous is described. INTRODUCTION A strong corporate brand can add value to the reputation of businesses that operate within a corporate conglomerate. To do so, the value of such a corporate brand has to be acknowledged by external audiences (customers, shareholders, and other external stakeholders) of the business unit. A positive attitude of customers and shareholders of the business unit is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a successful use of the corporate brand by business units, however. Within the multi-business company decision makers operating at the business unit level also have to judge the use of the corporate brand as useful. This paper addresses the issue of what drives business unit manager’s attitudes towards the use of a corporate brand. The majority of the present literature on corporate branding has focused on the impact of the use of corporate brands on the perceptions of external audiences such
as customers (eg, Brown and Dacin, 1997; Brown, 1998; Aaker and Keller, 1998) and competitors (eg, Higgens and Banister, 1992). The study of Brown and Dacin (1997) shows the value of corporate brands and how these brands can be extended to new products and/or activities performed by organizations. Their results imply that extending the use of the corporate brand to a larger set of products or activities can be beneficial. In practice however, many business unit managers are not highly inclined to label their activities with the corporate brand, even if market conditions would (potentially) favor such an extended use. One can question why this is the case and what drives business unit managers’ willingness to use a corporate brand. Only limited attention has been paid to managerial perspectives on the use of corporate brands (Campbell et al., 1995; Ind, 1999). This paper describes the SIDEC-model that can be used to support managerial decision making about the way the corporate brand should be used. SIDEC stands for Strategy, Internal organization, Driving forces, External prestige, and Corporate branding strategy. This model assumes that for successful uses of the corporate brand not only audiences external to the company, but also those within a company have to judge its use positively. This is especially the case for the decision-makers operating at the business unit level that have to endorse their activities with the
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